Part one of this history follows the suit from the 19th century to the 1930s and is available here. This article picks up the story where it left off.
1. Why did the Second World War impose minimalism on fashion?
In the 1940s, wartime rationing reached the garment industry as well. With cloth in short supply, the men’s suit turned minimalist. To save fabric, only single-breasted suits were cut, with narrow lapels and slim trousers without turn-ups. Overcoats and topcoats fell out of favour, as they took a great deal of material. The exception of the era was the zoot suit, defined by its excess of fabric. It emerged as a riposte within the African American and Mexican American communities of the United States.
2. What did the 1950s change in men’s style?
In the 1950s, the men’s suit returned to its pre-war look, free of any form of austerity. Even so, the waistcoat of the three-piece suit began to lose ground. The young rebelled against their parents’ generation and swapped the suit for T-shirts, jeans and leather jackets. For similar reasons, the Ivy League style was born, synonymous with the sack suit. Its defining features were a loose, single-breasted jacket (with three buttons), a single back vent, flap pockets, no shoulder pads and flat-front trousers. Brooks Brothers played a major part in popularising the Ivy League style, the epitome of the relaxed men’s suit. At the end of the 1950s, the opposite trend was the mod suit, defined by slim lines.
3. How did the sport jacket come about?
In the 1960s, the men’s suit largely continued in the direction of the previous decade. Man-made fibres began to find their way into suit cloth. Once the cloth of the jacket parted ways with that of the trousers, the idea of the sport jacket took shape.
4. Why did the 1970s mark a decline for the suit?
The 1970s marked a general decline for the suit. Bold cloths and a disregard for proportion parted the suit from any notion of elegance. The waistcoat did return, though in a more casual, relaxed form. John Travolta’s suit in Saturday Night Fever is the textbook case.
5. What did the power suit bring in the 1980s?
The 1980s brought an abrupt change for the better, in the form of the so-called power suit. A central figure of this kind of suit was Richard Gere, the screen’s archetypal American gigolo. Or Giorgio Armani, who widened the lapels considerably and lowered the buttoning point of the jacket. Another example came from Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Armani’s simplified style aside, the opulence of the power suit was a celebration of the triumph of Western capitalism. It was a time when the New York Stock Exchange boomed and the power broker was born. Young men in braces and striped shirts filled the buildings of Lower Manhattan, on the lookout for a fortune, with a confidence that shaped financial behaviour for decades. The stock exchange had become a battlefield ruled by risk and competition, and the power suit was the warriors’ armour.
6. What did the men’s suit look like in the 1990s and 2000s?
The 1990s saw another decline for the men’s suit. Fashion brought out every flaw of the previous decade, and the suit became a kind of clown costume: shiny, baggy, out of proportion and in loud colours. The 2000s, however, revisited the minimalist suit and gave it the slim lines familiar today. Tom Ford was among those who brought innovation in this direction.
7. Where does the men’s suit stand today?
Today, two forces keep the suit alive in the collective mind. One is the constant shift in trends and the frequent renewal of collections, favoured by the young. The other is a rediscovery of craftsmanship, born as a reaction against fast fashion and favoured by nostalgics. The preoccupations of the century, sustainability among them, have spurred new eco-friendly materials, which in turn have won the suit even more followers. It was precisely this rediscovery of craftsmanship that made the ZAVATE project possible.
8. Which books offer a deeper look at the history of the suit?
For devotees of men’s style who want to go deeper, the following books will prove useful:
• Adina Nanu. 2007. Artă, stil, costum [Art, Style, Costume]. Bucharest: Editura Noi Media Print.
• Adina Nanu, Ovidiu Buta. 2009. Bărbatul și moda [Man and Fashion]. Iași: Editura Polirom.
• Adriana Babeți. 2004. Dandysmul: o istorie [Dandyism: A History]. Iași: Editura Polirom.
• Adrian-Silvan Ionescu. 2006. Modă și societate urbană în România epocii moderne [Fashion and Urban Society in Modern Romania]. Bucharest: Editura Paideia.
• Bernhard Roetzel. 2009. Gentleman: ghidul etern al modei masculine [Gentleman: The Timeless Guide to Men’s Fashion]. Bucharest: Noi Distribuție. Konigswinter: Tandem Verlag.
• Doina Berchină. 1998. Mic dicționar subiectiv de modă contemporană [A Short Subjective Dictionary of Contemporary Fashion]. Bucharest: Editura Nemira.
• László Nagy. 2015. Stil Masculin: cum să te îmbraci bine și să plătești mai puțin [Men’s Style: How to Dress Well and Pay Less]. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Mega.
• Nicolas Schiffer. 2018. Stilul vestimentar masculin contemporan [Contemporary Men’s Dress Style]. Oradea: Editura Casa.
