Is the traditional suit dead? The future of formal wear, according to Savile Row's elite tailors

Simon Cundey admits that his company’s collaboration projects over recent years — with the likes of Adidas and Canada Goose — have tended to “raise eyebrows to start with, but they given us a certain dynamism, and the opportunity to speak to what may be your future customer”. Cundey runs Henry Poole, established 220 years ago, making it the oldest tailor on London’s tailoring Mecca, Savile Row. Nor is Poole alone: take, for examples Davies & Son’s collaboration with the Japanese designer Satoshi Kuwata, or Huntsman’s with Daniel Fletcher. As its older clientele might put it, Savile Row is getting with it.

And that matters, concedes Cundey: with a break down of formal dress codes, the rise of remote working (and, with it, the blurring the work and leisure time), the championing of a more entrepreneurial spirit in business and a generally more comfort-driven, streetwear-inflected approach to style, demand for the classic suit is not what it was.

A pre-pandemic study suggested that, even then, just one in 10 British workers wore a suit to work. And that they preferred it that way: it’s not just more comfortable, but cheaper, more egalitarian, making for a more relaxed working atmosphere.

Over 40 percent said the suit no longer had a place in the office.

Bespoke vs conformity

It’s why even Henry Poole has pivoted to bespoke, making more softer, unstructured garments.

“Even on Savile Row there needs to be alternatives [to the traditional suit], and more talk about how we can also do a more Italian, super-light construction if that’s what you want,” Cundey argues.

“It’s not ‘Poole’s new look’ but it’s important to simply get across the idea that Savile Row can do anything really. A sports jacket in denim? Sure, if that’s what you want”.

Well, not at the RAC Club. In the context of the society-wide casualisation of dress, it can seem remarkable that there are still places, like the Pall Mall institution, which insists its visitors must wear a suit, though it allows them to dispense with the tie during the summer, at least after 4pm. It’s charming, but surely also antiquated, likewise those few traditional professions — law and high finance, sometimes medicine and academia, for example — in which tailoring is still expected.

Even Debrett’s, the bible of dress etiquette, has recognised that, with the number of events at which, a generation ago, one would be expected to wear a suit having been hollowed out, the garment is in a state of decline.

It cuts not just against easier — for some, sloppier — ways of dressing (it’s telling how many men’s trousers come with elasticated waists now) but also perhaps the dominant trend of our times: a sense of identity achieved not through community, politics or work but through rampant individualism. The suit may have been what every man wore up until the advent of casualwear (look to period photos of British coal miners on their way to work, pre-WW2, and even they are wearing tailored jackets and trousers), but by the post-war period it had started to epitomise conformity.

That was best captured by Gregory Peck’s character, a cog in the corporate machine, in the 1956 film The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, which even then Adlai Stevenson described as reflecting a “crisis in the western world... collectivism colliding with individualism”. Who, after all, wants to be called ‘a suit’?

Rediscovering the pleasure of tailoring

But if the culture is against the classic matching jacket and trousers this doesn’t mean the suit is dead, so much as, as Cundey puts it, “undergoing ‘a period of correction’, like the markets after the 2008 financial crisis”.

Toby Lamb agrees, as might the brand director of Richard James — a company that, when it launched in 1992, helped save the tailored suit from decline then, by introducing more pizzazz to what had become very staid indeed.

He says that it’s less that suits still have a place thanks to weddings and funerals (as even that isn’t a set-in-stone requirement of attending those family events any more) so much that the tables have turned: freed from having to wear suits, men are rediscovering the wearing of them for pleasure.

This, arguably, is something men in jobs that have not required the wearing of a suit have appreciated for much longer.

“I think there will always be some kind of occasion for the structured suit, because people will always love the idea of dressing up for an event, of enjoying the opportunity to really run with that formality,” Lamb says.

“But, the appeal of that formal aesthetic aside, [the contemporary suit] is different. We can retain a formal aesthetic but use the kind of fabrics with an in-built performance that weren’t available not that long ago. Perhaps those performance qualities are what the suit needs to have now — formality with in-built technology.”

And, maybe, some fun too. Much as men are freed from having to wear a suit, so the suit has been freed from having to conform to a sober, work-friendly template: check out coverage of red carpet events of late and what the suit can now be, in terms of cut and colour, is evident.

At this year’s Grammys, for example, Pharrell Williams’ suit was in pink velvet, with flares, while Dijon’s suit jacket was asymmetric; at the Golden Globes Chris Perfetti’s electric blue suit was button-less, fastening by way of a giant brooch, while Ollie Muhl’s suit jacket was well below the knee in length. A suit matches top and bottom, but otherwise anything now goes: raglan sleeved, lapel-free, cropped, Velcro-fastened, very, very shiny. There’s been shift in definition that allows the suit to still work as an acknowledgement of the occasion, without insisting every man looks more or less the same.

“The suit has to change because so many of us have a different lifestyle now, and the need to dress quite so formally is only a very occasional thing,” reckons menswear designer Oliver Spencer.

“I think men can still take pleasure in dressing up to go out, but even then the suit we wear is a different kind of thing: it’s less stuffy, more colourful, more patterned, more interesting all round. Yes, it’s a suit, but it’s not the kind of suit that, say, our grandparents would readily recognise as being such.”

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