Ties. They can look flashy, fashionable and snappy, or they can bring back visions of boardrooms, the office, school or military dress-uniforms. They can be stylish and colourful, or they can be choking and restrictive, or possibly inducive of autoerotic asphyxiation…which might not be a bad thing. But I digress; fewer articles of clothing are more polarising to men other than whether you would, do, would not, or do not, choose to wear a tie.

Some people wear ties on a regular basis as part of a uniform. Some men wear ties because they’re part of their personal style or ‘look’. Personally, I’m in the camp of the latter. I started regularly wearing ties again about two years ago, and I’m still wearing them regularly today. In fact, I’m wearing one right now as I type this.

But how long have men been putting things around their necks? Where did they come from? Why on earth would someone do this?

The History of Neckwear

People have been putting on neckcloths for centuries. The modern necktie and its cousin, the bowtie, the two most common neck-coverings today, were descendants of one of the most common neck-coverings of the 17th century – the Cravat.

The cravat, a wide, scarf-like neck-cloth tied loosely around the throat, was the neck-covering of choice from the 1600s up to the 1800s. Some people who want a more loose and loungey, casual look in their neckwear still wear cravats, and their cousins, the neckerchieves, today. The word ‘cravat’ came from the French  ‘cravate’, which was a corruption of the word ‘Croat’, from the country of…Croatia, where the cravat was born in the 1630s.

The original purpose of these neck-coverings and cloths (be they cravats, kerchiefs or ties), was actually to hold the shirtfront shut, and to stop wind and cold air from blowing down into your clothes and onto your chest…it was a comfort thing.

The Birth of the Tie

By the mid-1800s, the cravat, a staple of men’s wardrobes for the past two centuries, was beginning to get a bit raggedy around the edges. As with a lot of other elements of men’s clothing at the time, people started wanting simpler, better-fitting, less flamboyant clothing. The cravat was being seen as a relic of the Regency era of the 1810s and it was quickly becoming sooo last century.

So the modern necktie was born. While the cravat and the neckerchief never really went away, by the last quarter of the 1800s, they were beginning to do serious battle with the new kid on the block – the necktie.

The necktie was popular for a number of reasons.

– The cravat is generally tied loosely and floppily around the throat. This was fine…so long as you didn’t have to keep tightening it up all the time. In the increasingly mechanised world of the late 1800s, the loose, wavy cravat was a liability. If it unluckily unravelled over a piece of whirring machinery, it could strangle the wearer to death! The necktie was done up so that it provided a tighter, safer knot.

– The necktie was simpler and didn’t take up so much real-estate. Cravats are like icebergs – three quarters of the cloth is stuffed down your shirtfront. And cravats are big, bulky things – that leads to a lot of excess material. Neckties were slim and simple, without wasted fabric.

– The necktie was easier to put on. A cravat had a lot of fabric and tying one could be frustrating. A necktie was thinner and had less to fuss around with, making it faster and more convenient to tie.

Tie Knots

There’s a multitude of tie-knots out there. According to author Thomas Fink, who did a study of the necktie, there are no fewer than 85 ways to tie a necktie. Screw that! I’m only going to talk about two knots.

Not all shirts are the same and not all collars are the same. So you should always know at least two tie-knots. One of the most common knots is the Four-in-Hand.

Four-in-Hand Knot

The four-in-hand knot is probably the simplest knot ever. Supposedly, it was named after coachmen, who would tie up the reins of their carriage-horses in a similar way, to stop them from tangling up during long drives. If you’ve never tied a tie and you really need to know how, this is the fastest way:

1. The tie’s draped around the popped-up collar and over your shoulders, with the right side longer than the left (and with the wider side on the right).

2. The right side of the tie is crossed over the front of the left and then pulled behind it to the right.

3. Then the right side of the tie is crossed over the left side again.

4. Then, it’s pulled up through the gap below your neck.

5. Using your fingers, wriggle a hole through the last of the two loops that you made around the skinnier portion of the tie.

6. Stuff the wide end of the tie down through that new hole you wiggled open with your fingers. Pull it down so that it’s nice and tight.

7. Close the gap below your neck by pulling on the short end of the tie to draw the knot up.

Note: As this is the knot that generally uses the least amount of material, you might end up with a tie that hangs down too low. If it does, untie and do it again. Simply repeat step 3 two or three more times. This uses up the extra fabric so that you don’t have so much left over when the knot’s done up.

The four-in-hand knot is best used with shirts with spearpoint collars, that leave only a small space between the ends of the collar. This is because the knot that results from tying a tie in this fasion is rather long and skinny (unless you wrapped the tie around the knot a few more times to use up the extra fabric like I mentioned up above).

The Windsor Knots

The knots which are collectively called the Windsor knots, go by many names. But the general style was named after the dapper Duke of Windsor (who caused a scandal in 1936 when he abdicated the British throne). However, the knot itself was actually invented by his father (King George V), who had a reputation of being a strict dresscode adherent.

Windsor knots are also called Full Windsors, Double Windsors and Half-Windsors.

What the hell is the difference?

Full Windsor and Double Windsor are the same thing.

Half-Windsor is…a…half-Windsor.

So how do you tie one?

The Windsor-knot is famous, not only because of its royal connections, but because it’s a fat, chunky knot with a lot of symmetry. Here’s how you do one up.

1. Drape your tie over your shoulders and around your popped-up collar. Longer, wider side on the right, skinnier and shorter side on your left.

2. Cross the long side over the short side (left).

3. Loop the long side behind, and then up, through the gap below your neck, and outwards. Then, pull down. The front of the wider end of the tie should now be hanging down, on your left-hand side.

4. Cross the wide side of the tie back behind the knot again, but this time, pull it right across to the right side of your body.

5. Pull it up and stick it through the gap below your neck, keeping to the right side, this time. Pull it down. This is similar to step 3, only in reverse and on the other side of the knot. In this case, the BACK side of the wide end of the tie should be facing outwards.

6. Draw the wide end of the tie across the front of the knot to the left, and then poke it through the gap below your neck from behind, again (as in step 3).

7. Toss the wide end of the tie back over your left shoulder. Stick your finger down the front of the knot to make a hole there. Stuff the rest of the wide end of your tie down that hole and pull tight.

8. Pull the shorter, back end of the tie down to close the knot.

If you’ve done it right, then you should have a fat, triangular knot. Also, there should be a little dimple in your tie just below the knot – a distinctive trademark of a Windsor knot.

Alright. You’ve just done a Full or Double Windsor knot. Again, as with the four-in-hand knot, if you’ve left with too much fabric, undo the tie, readjust and tie again, but repeating steps 3 and 5 one or two more times to use up the extra fabric to make the finished length more correct.

So how do you do a Half-Windsor knot?

Easy. Just do half the steps. That’s why it’s called a Half-Windsor!

Do steps 1-3. Then instead of doing step 4 (bringing the tie around the back of the knot to the front to the right and stuffing it down the neck-gap again), simply bring it around the back, all the way around the front and to the back again (in a loop), then do steps 3, 7 and 8. Done.

The Four-in-Hand, the Full/Double and Half-Windsor knots are the most commonly-used tie-knots. The Windsor knots, because of their chunkier results, are best tied on shirts with spread collars, where a knot that takes up a lot of shirt real-estate is preferrable.

The Bowtie

Like the necktie, the bowtie is descendant from the granddaddy of all neck-cloths, the cravat. Okay. I won’t go into all that again.

Doing up a necktie is easy. Most boys learn how to do one up for school uniforms and the like. But a bowtie can be daunting and scary and intimidating!

It isn’t.

Bowties carry certain connotations – You’re a professor, banker, teacher, doctor, Hercule Poirot, or if you wear thick-rimmed glasses, have buck-teeth and wear a shortsleeved shirt – a nerd. But bowties can also carry a connotation of skill…mostly because they’re perceived as being impossible to tie.

Agatha Christie’s dandy Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot (portrayed by David Suchet), with his trademark bowtie

They’re not.

And this is how you do it.

I’ll be honest. There are a bazillion video-tutorials on YouTube that show you how to do up a bowtie. And you could disregard everything here that’s to come, and just go and watch one of those. But one reason why there’s so many of those videos is because they all show you how to tie a bowtie…but they don’t tell you. “You do this, then this, then this, then this, then this…voila!”

Yeah. Slow down. The video’s over in two minutes and you’re standing there with a piece of crap tied around your neck and your big fancy Black-Tie dinner is in half an hour. You’re screwed.

Tying a bowtie is easy – I got it after just three attempts. If a doofus like me can do it, anyone can. Here’s how:

1. Pop up your collar.

2. Adjust the length of your tie. Quality bowties have a cinch or an adjuster on them. Use this to get the length of the tie right.

How long does the tie have to be? Well, if it’s draped over your chest and around your neck, the left end of the tie should be at your nipple or at the top of your sternum. The right end should be about an inch or so longer than that. Adjust the tie’s length so that this is achieved (the short end of the tie is always on the left, the long side is on the right). Go ahead. I’ll wait…

3. Okay, done that? Now, to tie stuff up. Cross the long end of the tie over the short end (to the left). Stick the long end up behind the knot and pull up, firmly. The long end of the tie is now on your left shoulder and it should’ve looped around there from behind the left part of the tie. Yes? Good. Leave it there.

4. The other half of the tie is now pointing straight down. It should be shaped like a fish, with the tail pointing down and the head pointing up. Fold the tie in half across the middle of the head. Then twist this part of the tie to the left. You should have a nice, bowtie-looking shape under your chin if you’re looking in the mirror.

5. Keeping this position, flop the other part of the tie (on your shoulder) down over the middle of this bowtie shape.

6. Pinch the head and tail of the fishy bow which you created in step 4, together, and pull outwards. You’ll now have two holes. One between your neck and the tie itself, and one smaller one in front of that, just big enough for your finger to poke through.

7. The long half of your bowtie is now hanging down just like the other half was, with the fishtail pointing down and the head pointing up. Do as you did with the other half of the tie – Fold the head in half and twist it to the left.

8. Now for the tricky bit. Remember that little hole I mentioned at the end of step 6? You’re now gonna shove the folded head of your other fishy through that hole. I find it helps to fold the fish again, lengthwise, to fit it through here.

9. Done that? Now you should have:

Front bow – folded side on the left. Fishtail on the right.
Back bow – Folded side on the right. Fishtail on the left.

During this procedure, the middle of your bowtie knot might become a bit twisted. You can untwist it slightly to make it a little neater.

Now, to tighten and neaten.

Pull on the two fishheads to tighten the knot, and on the two tails to loosen the knot. Keeping pulling on the heads and the tails until symmetry and a comfortable tightness has been attained. Straighten out the fish-heads (especially the inner right one, which may have become a little crinkled in the exercise), and you’ve got a perfect bowtie!

Now you’re ready for that school formal or prom or that Black Tie family reunion or that fancy dress party which you’re attending as a Computer Nerd.

To undo the tie later, simply pull on the fishtails, and the whole thing just comes apart.

Note: Don’t worry if the tie isn’t absolutely super-duper crazy mega-perfect. No self-tied bowtie ever is. But you can try to get close.

The shirt is probably the most common item ever worn by man and any well-dressed man is likely to have several of them in many colours and styles. But where does the shirt come from and how has this simple garment evolved over time?

Where Does the Shirt Come From?

The modern shirt that a typical man wears on an almost daily basis is a garment that dates back into the Middle Ages and before. Exactly when it was invented is unknown. Most shirts were cheap and handmade at home out of wool, but by the 1300s, men started looking for people who made shirts for a living. It was at this time that the shirtmaker started to rise in European cities, manufacturing comfortable shirts out of cotton, silk and linen. These shirts felt much better against the skin than ordinary wool and the demand for comfort meant that the shirt began to spread around the world. The basic shirt remained the same for centuries, as it does today. It was the components of the shirt that changed with the times.

The Rise of the Shirt

Originally, all shirts, as with all other garments, were handmade. If you wanted a shirt, you went to a shirtmaker, just like if you wanted shoes, you went to a cobbler, and a tailor for your suits. In the 1700s and the 1800s, the rise of the Industrial Revolution meant that shirts could now be mass-produced cheaply from cotton, mostly grown in the Deep South of the United States of America and sent to cotton-mills in the nothern states, or to England and Europe. While the shirt’s popularity spread, its status remained the same.

A Social History of the Shirt

These days, it’s common for men to show off their shirts. You wear a shirt open-collared with a pair of trousers or jeans. Or you open the front of your jacket to show off your shirt. Or you wear a waistcoat but ditch the jacket, to show off your shirtsleeves. Or you might spend fifteen minutes trying to figure out whether or not a particular tie goes with a particular shirt. However, this trend of showing off your shirt as an item of ‘designer fashion’ and style is actually a pretty modern one. Prior to the second quarter of the 1900s, good manners dictated that you never showed your shirt in public. At all. Not the back, the front, the sleeves and certainly not the shirttails. Why? Because the shirt, like your briefs or your boxer-shorts, was considered an item of underwear, a frame of mind that had existed for centuries before.

Because the humble shirt was, for centuries, relegated to and given the same level of decency as your lucky boxer-shorts with the picture of the ‘Blasting Zone’ roadsign on the back, a typical shirt was rarely washed. While today it’s common for a man to change his shirts every couple of days, prior to the end of the First World War, most men wore shirts for much longer intervals. It wasn’t uncommon for one shirt to be worn for two days. Three days. A week. Two weeks. Sometimes even a month…or more. Don’t forget that the modern washing-machine hasn’t been around for very long. Before its invention, the family wash was an event that took several days of boiling, soaking, soaping, scrubbing, beating, rinsing, scrubbing, rinsing, mangling, drying, ironing, starching and folding. Because of the effort and time required to do a single load of laundry, which could take up to a week, men were eager to wear their shirts for as long as possible and to only wash them when it was absolutely necessary. And because of this, the shirt was naturally kept hidden from public scrutiny as much as possible.

Anyone who’s done a lot of work in a shirt and worn it for a while and then had to handwash it, will know that a shirt’s collar and cuffs can turn black from the accumulation of grime, sweat and skin-flakes that comes away from the human body during the course of the day. With the majority of a man’s shirt hidden by a waistcoat and jacket or a sweater or some other suitable overgarment, it wasn’t necessary to change it until it was absolutely essential. But the exposed parts of the shirt – the collar and cuffs, which could become filthy after just one day’s heavy use, would naturally have to be changed on a regular basis, since this was something that couldn’t be hidden from the public eye.

Collar Studs…

…and how they’re used

Collars and Cuffs

To combat the problem of infrequent and long wash-days, early shirts came with detachable collars and cuffs, not something found on most shirts today. While a shirt was worn for days or weeks on end, the collars and cuffs were changed and replaced as necessary, perhaps once a week, or more, if needed. The collars and cuffs on shirts were held on with special buttons called studs. There were two studs for the collar (front and back) and additional studs for the cuffs (one stud for each sleeve). While most people are familiar with all manner of cuffs, from one-button, two-button, convertible cuffs and the variations of the French cuff (for which cufflinks must be worn), detachable shirt-collars have largely slipped from the public consciousness. Here’s some of the more common collars…

Wing Collar

The wing-collar, so-called because of the two ‘wings’ at the front, is popularly associated with the turn of the last century. Wing-collars are typically worn with more formal attire, such as White Tie, but they were also popular everyday collars. This particular type of collar retained its unique shape thanks to copius amounts of starch used in the ironing process that helped the collar stay stiff, even in the hottest, soggiest weather. As you may have guessed, the wing-collar doesn’t fold down. So if you’re going to wear one, you better know how to tie a good necktie or bowtie, because any imperfections in the knot will be extremely visible.

Eton Collar

Named for the prestigeous Eton College in the United Kingdom, the broad Eton Collar has been a part of the school’s uniform since the 1800s.

Spear-Point Collar

The spear-point collar was popular in the United States during the first half of the 20th century, distinguished by its excessively long, pointed collar-tips.

Club Collar

Popular during the Victorian era and well into the early 20th century prior to the Second World War, was the club collar. Unlike the other collars shown so far, the club collar has rounded collar-points.

Clerical Collar

This flat collar is the one traditionally worn by members of the clergy (hence its name), such as priests, vicars, and pastors. It was invented in the mid-1800s by the Rev. Dr. Donald McLeod of Scotland, and by the late 19th century, had become a common part of clerical attire.

Imperial Collar

The Imperial collar was another popular collar of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This was one of the more extreme collars of the era and could be upwards of two or three inches wide. This could make it a bit uncomfortable to wear and probably thankfully, it was considered a formal collar, only to be worn on special occasions.

Because a man could have a wide variety and large number of collars in his wardrobe, they were often stored in leather collar-boxes such as this one:

While some collars were soft and floppy, others, particularly the nonfolding rigid ones such as the Wing collar and the Imperial collar, were treated extensively with laundry starch to help them keep their shape (as well as making them easier to clean).

Detachable shirt-cuffs also existed and like with collars, they were often treated with starch to make them stiff so that they would hold their shape. As mentioned earlier, cuffs were held onto a man’s shirtsleeves with cuff-studs. A pair of detachable cuffs are shown below:

The two buttonholes at the tops of the cuffs accomodated the cuff-studs. The two other buttonholes further down existed for the use of cufflinks.

A big manufacturer of mens’ shirts, collars and cuffs was Cluett, Peabody & Co. of Troy in New York State, U.S.A. They popularised the famous ‘Arrow’ brand of collars which were popular from the early 1900s up to the early 1930s. The Arrow collar lives on today in the lyrics of the Irving Berlin song ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz‘ (“…High hats and Arrow collars, white spats and lots of dollars…”).

Shirtsleeves

Apart from early shirts having removable and adjustable collars and cuffs, they also had adjustable shirtsleeves.

Early shirts came in one size. Extra large. Don’t forget that, because the shirt was considered an undergarment, no thought was given to its fit on a man’s body, since nobody was ever likely to see it. Shirts were sized roughly according to neck circumfrence and shoulder-width, but everything else was measured and made to be as accomodating as possible. This included shirtsleeves. Prior to the arrival of the modern shirt that we know today, shirtsleeves were all made and measured to be extra-long. This way, they would fit the largest man in comfort.

But what happened if you weren’t the largest man? What happened if, instead of being Robert Wadlow (8ft 11in), you were instead James Madison, who towered over ants at a staggering 5ft 4in.? Obviously, shirtsleeves would be too long. And if you weren’t able to find a shirtmaker, or as was more likely the case, weren’t rich enough to get a shirtmaker to custom-measure your sleeves, then what did you do?

Most men utilised these things:

Forever associated with bartenders, writers, banker-tellers and barbershop quartets, there was a time where almost every well-dressed man owned at least one pair of these things and kept them on his dressing-table. They’re called sleeve-garters. Made of elastic material (or in this case, springy steel), sleeve-garters were worn on a man’s shirtsleeves, just above the elbow. They worked by holding back the extra sleeve-material that would otherwise cascade down a man’s arms and prevent his hands from doing any useful work. They were also handy for holding a man’s shirtsleeves back if he was doing heavy work and didn’t want to get his sleeves and cuffs dirty.

Thanks to the modern, made-to-measure, off-the-rack shirt, sleeve-garters aren’t as often used as once they were. However, you can still buy them (they’re usually very cheap) and if ever you have a shirt you like but which you can’t wear on account of the sleeves being too long, you might want to break out grandpa’s sleeve-garters and slap them on. They can still come in handy.

The Modern Shirt

The shirt with detachable collars and cuffs died out during the interwar period and the shirt which we know today was born. With improvements in washing and cleaning clothes and the introduction of the first washing-machines in the 1920s, clothing could now be washed faster and more frequently. Public demand for shirts with detachable collars and cuffs gradually died away during the 1930s and by the middle of the century were more or less ancient history. Cloth-rationing during the Second World War probably played a significant part in their demise, since it would’ve been difficult to find the extra cloth needed for detachable collars and cuffs.

You can still buy shirt-collars and cuffs (either brand new or vintage) as well as collar-studs, shirt-studs and collarless shirts today, although understandably, they are much rarer than the shirts that most people have today. They’re still manufactured for formalwear, or for people seeking an authentic period look in their wardrobe for any variety of reasons from a desire for vintage style, historical reenacting or sheer convenience and comfort. Collar-boxes can still be found cheaply at antiques stores and flea-markets.

This posting marks the second anniversary of the starting of my blog, back on the 29th of October, 2009. To date, I have received over 253,500 hits. Thanks to everyone who has peeked in here and learned something. Thanks to everyone who has commented on, asked questions about, or clarified and improved on the postings that I’ve made over the last twenty-four months. And thanks to all my regular readers for checking back every now and then to see what’s new and leaving your marks in my comments boxes (yes, there are people who will subject themselves to the masochism of reading this blog on a regular basis). Yadda, yadda, yadda. I digress.

On this date last year, I wrote about how to effectively use a traditional straight-razor to get a superior (and cost-effective) shave. In the 21st century, straight-razor shaving is coming back into fashion as men become attracted to the nostalgia, the masculinity, the effectiveness, the ‘greenness’ and the thriftiness of straight-razor shaving.

This posting will concentrate another historical titbit that has recently started coming back into fashion:

Hats.

Hats are forever linked to history. We identify various periods in history by a lot of things: The technology, the science, the architecture, but probably most of all, we identify them by the fashions of the times. The hats and clothes that people wore. Or in more recent times, didn’t wear. For a period between the 1970s-1990s, mens’ hats went out of fashion. Nobody was wearing them. Hats were old-fashioned, dated, boring. They didn’t fit the clothes that people were wearing. But then,  in the early 21st century, hat-wearing for men (and women) is coming back into fashion. This article will look at the history of men’s hats and the hat’s place in modern society. Here we go…

The Hat: Yesterday and Today

Ever since ancient times, men have worn hats. To keep the sun off, to keep warm, to look fashionable or to add a few inches of height to their stumpy frames. In the early 21st century, hats for men are making a significant return to mainstream fashion, nudged along by recent movies and TV shows such as “Boardwalk Empire”, “Public Enemies”, “Upstairs, Downstairs”, “Downton Abbey” and “Underbelly: Razor”. But what are the histories of all these popular hats that we see in movies, TV shows and photographs? In period dramas? That we read about in books? Where did they come from? How long have they been around? Where do they get their names from? Let’s find out…

The Tricorne Hat

When? 1700s
Who? Patriots, sea-captains, any male cast-member of a colonial-era costume-drama.

Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) wearing a tricorne hat

The tricorne is the famous, triangle-shaped hat with a round crown at the top. It’s the hat that Mel Gibson wears in “The Patriot”. It’s the hat worn by almost every male actor who’s ever participated in a 1700s historical reenactment of the American Revolution, or the French Revolutionary Wars. Where did it come from?

The tricorne is a stiff hat made of felt (usually beaver or rabbit felt). It evolved from the round, wide-brimmed hats of the late 1600s, similar to the ones shown below:

In the early 1700s, it became fashionable to fold up the circular brims of these hats and attach them to the crown with needle and thread. This stopped the wide, floppy brims from blocking the wearer’s line of sight, but the folded brims also became rain-gutters that stopped rainwater from simply sloshing off the old wide brims and down the back of your neck. The rain instead ran out the corners of the hat and down the back of your shoulders, away from your body.

The tricorne was invented by the Spanish in the late 1600s/early 1700s. It quickly became popular in France and other parts of Europe, as well as in England and in the American colonies. The hat remained popular right up to the end of the 1790s. It was then replaced by the bicorne hat, popularly associated with Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Top Hat

When? Early 1800s
Who? Abraham Lincoln, Uncle Moneybags (the ‘Monopoly’ man), the Fat Controller in Thomas the Tank Engine, anyone from Dickensian England.

A typical top hat

The top hat is very rarely worn today, except on the most formal of formal occasions, but there was a time not too long ago, when it was worn by everybody on every day of the week.

The top hat was born in the 1790s and became the replacement headwear for men after the tricorne hat of the 18th century started going out of fashion. The top hat is a stiff hat made of felt (usually beaver felt, but rabbit felt is also used). The top hat was worn by everyone during the Victorian era, from the poorest of paupers all the way up to the richest of royals. Abraham Lincoln is famous for wearing a top hat style popularly called the ‘stovepipe’, because of its excessively high crown. Considering that Lincoln towered over the average mid-century American at an impressive six foot, four inches, he probably didn’t need anything else to make him stick out in the crowd.

The top hat was worn for all kinds of occasions, from going to the theatre and to the opera, to weddings, important public events, formal social events or just for daily wear. Top hats worn for weddings are usually light grey in colour, while top hats worn for evening events are jet black. In the 1840s and 50s, the top hat started being made out of the more familiar silk that it’s known for today, and manufacture of beaver-felt top hats started to decline. Because of the top hat’s height and size, the collapsable top hat was invented in 1812 by Antoine Gibus. Its collapsable quality made it popular because such hats were easier to store in cloakrooms of hotels, theatres and restaurants.

Up until the early 1860s, officers of the London Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard’s famous ‘bobbies’) used to wear strengthened top hats for head-protection as part of their uniform. In 1863, the present ‘custodion helmet’ replaced them.

The Bowler Hat

When? Mid-1800s
Who? Accountants, bankers, Charlie Chaplin, Oddjob, the Plug Uglies.

A classic black bowler hat

The Bowler hat, characterised by it’s dome-like crown, was invented in 1849 by a pair of hatmakers: brothers Thomas and William…Bowler. They were commissioned by the famous London hat retailer “Lock & Co” to invent a close-fitting, low-crowned hat that would be sturdy and which couldn’t be easily knocked or blown off the wearer’s head. The Bowler brothers later found out that their customer was Edward Coke, brother to the Second Earl of Leicester.

When the prototype ‘Bowler’ hat was invented, Mr. Coke came to check it out. He showed up in London on the 17th of December, 1849 and headed to Lock & Co’s shop to examine his new hat. Remembering that he had asked for a particularly durable creation, Mr. Coke threw the hat on the ground and jumped on it twice to check its strength. When the hat remained in shape, Coke proclaimed his satisfaction at this new invention and paid twelve shillings for the hat.

The Bowler hat remained popular throughout the 1800s and through the first half of the 1900s, being worn by everyone from politicians, actors and the everyman on the street.

But who, you might ask, are the ‘Plug Uglies’?

The Plug Uglies were an American street-gang of the mid-1800s. They were famous for almost all of them wearing their distinctive bowler hats. Because of the bowler’s strength, the hats were worn by the Uglies as helmets to prevent head-injuries in the middle of gang-fights.

The Fedora & Trilby Hats

When? Late 1800s
Who? Humphrey Bogart, Adam Savage, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Prohibition-era gangsters, Indiana Jones, almost every man in the 20s and 30s.

Humphrey Bogart sporting a classic, wide-brimmed Fedora

Frank Sinatra wearing the Fedora’s little brother, a Trilby. You can immediately tell the difference between them: The trilby has a much shorter brim (and although you can’t see it in that photo, it would have a tight, upwards curl at the back)

The Fedora, and its little brother, the Trilby, are two of the most famous and timeless of all men’s hats. Both invented in the early 1890s, the Fedora and the Trilby remained largely popular into the 1960s. Since then, their popularity dropped significantly, but in the 2000s, they have returned to style thanks to recent 1930s-era gangster-films and TV shows that have been flashing across the television-screens of the world.

The Fedora was invented in 1891, and the Trilby in 1894. The Fedora features a wide brim, a hat-band or ribbon and a pinched and indented crown. The Trilby is similarly shaped, but typically has a shorter brim (and a tighter upturning at the back). Both hats are traditionally made of rabbit or beaver felt and come in both firm and soft varieties.

The Fedora and Trilby hats became popular because of their relatively compact size (compared with something like a top hat) and their lower profiles. They could be worn comfortably in cars and on public transport without the hat’s brim obscuring the driver’s line of sight. Hollywood movies of the 20s, 30s and 40s made the Fedora incredibly popular and it used to be that almost every man owned at least one.

Here’s an interesting fact you might not know: The fedora, when it started out in the 1890s, was actually a women’s hat! This trend lasted through the 1900s up to the late 1910s; all the males in the world sticking to bowlers, flat caps and top hats instead. However, fashion changed in the 20s (as did many other things) and today, the fedora, and its little brother, the Trilby, have become more than ever, associated with male wearers.

The Boater Hat

When? Late 1800s
Who? Punters, oarsmen, sailors, barbershop quartets, vaudeville entertainers, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers…

The Dapper Dans, Disneyland’s resident 1900s-style barbershop quartet, with their matching waistcoats, trousers, sleeve-garters and of course…their boater hats

The Boater hat, characterised by its flat crown, straight sides, flat brim and circular or oval profile, is the classic summertime hat. It gets the name ‘Boater’ (also called a ‘Skimmer’ hat) because it was traditionally worn by Venetian gondoliers. It was from Italy that the hat spread rapidly around the world. It remained popular from the 1880s all the way through to the 1930s and 40s, slowly dying off after the Second World War.

Before becoming the piece of classic summertime headgear which we know today,
the boater was the traditional hat of Venetian gondoliers, designed to protect them from the strong Italian sun

The classic boater hat is made of straw. This makes it lightweight, comfortable and breathable in hot summer weather, when thicker felt hats, more suitable for winter, would make the wearer sweat and perspire very freely. The boater remains popular today in countries with strong summers where other styles of hats would be uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time. Why is this hat also called a ‘skimmer’? Well, traditionally, the ‘boater’ had a more generous brim-width. The ‘Skimmer’ is a variant of the Boater with a narrower brim.

Panama Hat

When? Early 1800s
Who? Harry Truman, Edward VII, Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, Theodore Roosevelt

A traditional Panama hat, complete with its wide brim, perfect for protection from the tropic sun

Along with the Boater, the Panama hat is another classic mens’ summer hat. The Panama hat comes in a variety of crown-shapes, but it is distinguished by the material used to make it: The leaves of the Toquilla Palm. The fronds of this particular type of tree (although it is not scientifically considered a proper palmtree) are soft, strong and flexible, ideal for making light, durable, breathable summer hats.

The Panama was invented in the early 1800s, probably in the 1830s. Despite what the name suggests, the hats were not invented (or even made) in Panama. They were actually invented in Ecquador. They get the name ‘Panama’ because that was the country to which most of these new hats were exported. The tropical climate of Panama made just such a hat ideal to cope with the soggy, humid conditions in just such a country. As the hat’s fame spread around the world, it became a popular summertime hat and general travel-hat. It’s light construction and breathable material made it ideal for summer use and its soft, crushable material (which would retain its shape with some gentle prodding after being unrolled) made it perfect for travelling, when a man could just roll up the hat, tie a ribbon around it and put it in his suitcase.

The Panama remains popular today (along with the Fedora and the Trilby) as a summer hat.

The Homburg Hat

When? Late 1800s
Who? Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Edward VII, Hercule Poirot

Winston Churchill wearing his signature Homburg hat

Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot (portrayed by David Suchet) with his three-piece suit, pocketwatch, swan-headed cane and of course…his Homburg

The Homburg is a very distinct hat. It has a tightly curled brim on both sides and a dent or crease in the top of the crown, running lengthwise from front to back. The Homburg is named after Bad Homburg (‘Homburg Baths’), a town in the state of Hesse in Germany, where it was created. It was introduced to the world at large by the youthfully fashionable but increasingly overweight Prince Albert Edward, later Edward VII of the United Kingdom, son of Queen Victoria. The Homburg was a popular hat in the late Victorian period and remained popular through the first half of the 20th century. It was commonly associated with politicians; Winston Churchill was a notable wearer of this style of hat. Homburgs are typically made of rabbit felt.

The Flat Cap

When? 1500s
Who? Working-class men, newsboys, golfers, Dr. Harry Cooper.

Brad Pitt wearing a flat cap

The classic flat cap (also called a newsboy cap, eight-panel cap, driving-cap…the list goes on) is a light, floppy cap or hat, traditionally made of lightly spun wool. Variations of the flat-cap date back centuries, when wool was the backbone of the English economy. It arrived in its present form (and variations thereof) in the early 1800s. Because flat-caps were cheap, comfortable and long-lasting, they were frequently worn by poorer, working-class people looking for an affordable and effective head-covering to keep their heads warm during outdoor work in cold weather.

The flat cap comes in two varieties: The traditional flat-topped cap and a variation called the Eight-Panel Cap (alternatively, also the six-panel cap). The eight-panel or six-panel cap is characterised by six (or eight, hence the name) triangular panels sewn together to make a rough circle on the top of the hat, held together in the center by a cloth knob or button. This variety of cap is sometimes called the ‘newsboy’ cap, because it was commonly worn by newsboys (children hired by newspaper companies) who sold newspapers on street-corners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As the 20th century progressed, the flat cap became popular with a wealthier set. Because other hat-styles of the day were too bulky and cumbersome to wear with a pair of goggles, early motorists would wear a flat cap with their driving outfits when they went out for a spin. The flat cap’s low profile meant that it wouldn’t fly off in the slipstream generated by early, open-top cars, and it would keep dust and grit from getting into the driver’s hair. In Australia, the flat cap is commonly associated with noted veterinary surgeon, Dr. Harry Cooper.

The Pith Helmet

When? 1870s
Who? Big game hunters, soldiers, prospectors, Van Pelt from ‘Jumanji’.

A classic pith-helmet

The Pith Helmet is the classic hunter’s headgear. Together with a khaki outfit, boots, socks, a belt, a cylindrical canteen of water and a fully-loaded shotgun, it conjures up images of tracking and hunting big game in the wilds of Africa or the jungles of subtropic America. Or possibly, it makes you think of the British soldiers in the film “Zulu“.

The pith helmet was invented in the mid-1800s, but it gained its current, iconic shape in the 1870s. It’s made, not out of straw or felt, but rather out of a material called ‘pith’.

Pith is the soft, spongy tissue found inside the branches and trunks of trees. It’s typically white (or light brown) in colour. The pith used to make the classic pith-helmet comes from the Sola Pith, a flowering plant native to tropical countries such as India and Malaysia.

The Slouch Hat

When? 1600s
Who? Military personnel, the ANZACs

A vintage slouch hat from the Australian Army, ca. 1955. Note the upcurved brim, pinned in place with a ‘Rising Sun’ Australian military badge

The slouch hat, instantly recognisable from its pinched crown and wide, floppy brim, is a holdover from the years of Stuart England. The slouch hat was invented in England in the 1600s and it rose and fell in popularity for the next 200-odd years. It came back to fashion in the 1800s when it was adopted for use by the British Army and starting in the 1880s, the military forces of what would eventually become the Commonwealth of Australia. The slouch hat is a soft felt hat and its wide brim made it especially handy in hot weather when it kept the sun off the wearer’s face and body.

However, because of the hat’s wide brim, it soon became apparent that this hat was perhaps not the best choice for soldiers. The floppy, soft felt of the hat’s brim would get in the way of a soldier’s rifle when he raised it against his shoulder in presentation, or when he raised his arm and braced the rifle against his shoulder, ready to fire. To fix this problem, it became the fashion to pin up one side of the hat’s brim to make way for the rifle and to stop it from getting in the way. The hat remains closely associated with the Australian Army to this day, along with the pinned-up brim.

Hats in the 21st Century

Since the mid-2000s, mens’ hats have been returning to fashion with increasing speed, spurred on by popular new movies and TV shows that have their settings in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. The Trilby and its big brother, the Fedora, have become extremely popular and they’re now available in a wide range of colours, sizes and materials, ranging from the cheapest, mass-produced cheap straw and paper-woven $20 flea-market variety, to the heirloom-quality, felt hats of the early 20th century. Today, hats are being worn to keep the head warm and the face cool, hats are being worn to complete a vintage-inspired ‘look’, or to accessorise a more modern, casual kit. Is the hat here to stay? Maybe. Will its use continue to rise or remain steady? Or is it just a fad? Who knows? Everything old is new again. Fashion comes in waves, but style stays forever. As people become more health-conscious about the dangers of overexposure to the sun, and the comforts that a good hat can give them either in summer or winter, hats will continue to rise in popularity due to their sheer practicality, if for nothing else.

Buying a Hat Today

Okay. You’ve read all that stuff and now you’re bored. Or maybe you’re interested. Interested enough, perhaps, to buy your very first hat. You’re tired of those baseball caps that you collected when you were a kid and you want to get a proper guy’s hat. Maybe you’ve always wanted one. Maybe you think they’re stylish. Maybe you bought a new suit and you want a hat to go with it. Perhaps you just finished a “Boardwalk Empire” marathon? What do you look for in a nice hat?

Material

Hats can be made of anything. Plastic, wool, straw, sedge, paper…But a proper hat, a hat that you can wear out to dinner, or out on a cold wintery day to keep your head warm, is traditionally made of felt. Two different kinds of felt, to be precise.

Depending on where you live and which animal is more readily available, hats can be made of either rabbit or beaver-fur felt. In Europe, the tradition leans towards beaver felt first and rabbit felt second. In Australia, by comparison, hats are made of rabbit-felt (the rabbit being a plentiful and pestilential creature that roams the Australian outback in frustrating abundance). Rabbit felt is generally smoother and a bit firmer, while beaver felt tends to be a little ‘fluffier’ and softer. Benefits of animal felt in hatmaking include water-resistence (hats made of beaver and/or rabbit felt will not shrink if they get wet, as opposed to cheaper hats made of wool-felt), strength (they won’t rip or tear easily) and shape (they won’t deform as easily as other materials).

The majority of classic mens’ hats are made of felt. The Homburg, Trilby, Fedora, Top Hat and Bowler are all felt hats. Felt hats are usually winter hats. They’ll keep your head warm if it’s windy, rainy or snowy outside, and they’re nice and fuzzy and soft. However, felt hats are not very good for summertime use. There’s very little ventilation in such hats, so any heat trapped inside (which would be beneficial in winter) would become extremely uncomfortable in summer.

Summer hats are traditionally made of straw in a variety of weaves, that will make them either firm or loose and floppy. The Boater hat traditionally has a tight weave and is very firm and hard. The Panama Hat, by comparison (also made of a variety of straw), is lighter and floppier and a bit more breathable. Panamas are so cloth-like in their construction, that some varieties of this hat can even be rolled up for storage; something that would destroy a boater.

Lining

Not all hats come with linings. Some top-quality hats are deliberately sold without linings because the hat material would make linings unnecessary or ineffective (such as soft, floppy felt hats, where the lining would get crushed and crinkled anyway). Linings on hats are typically made of silk. On some hats (generally the newer hats), the silk lining is further protected by an additional plastic lining, which would prevent sweat-stains from damaging the silk. Plastic interior liners also have the advantage of being easier to wipe clean.

Sweatband

Eeeww yuck!

Oh come on. Everyone sweats. And those who wear hats are no exception. One way to tell a good-quality hat from a cheaper one is to check the sweatband. Cheaper hats may just have cotton sweatbands or no sweatbands at all. Hats of good quality (whether they be felt or straw) traditionally have sweatbands made of high-quality leather. Leather is soft, comfortable, strong and long-lasting. Leather sweatbands are traditionally machine-sewn into the linings of their hats, but in more modern times, sewing might be reinforced (or completely replaced) by super-strength industrial glue.

Ribbons/Bands

Awww. Ribbons…Cute!

Hat-bands or hat-ribbons have adorned hats for centuries. No, they’re not an indicator of quality, but they can be an indicator of style. Hats that are traditionally sold with ribbons will typically have them stitched loosely around the crown of the hat. If you feel daring enough, it is possible to remove the ribbon that came with your hat and tie and sew on a new ribbon that’s more to your taste. Hat ribbons are useful features apart from just being aesthetic. Hat-ribbons can be useful places to stick things such as cards (put on a nice suit, grab an old-fashioned magnesium flashbulb camera and stick a ‘PRESS’ card into your hat and you could look like a journalist interviewing one of the survivors of the Hindenburg Crash), matchsticks, feathers or, as was the style from time to time, decorative hat-pins.

How Does It Fit?

A good-fitting hat should sit firmly (but not temple-crushing tightly) around your head, with the brim resting on your ears. It shouldn’t fall off easily when you bend over and it should stay on in a fresh gust of wind.If you’re fighting to put your hat on every morning and it’s giving you migraines once you’ve won the battle…the hat’s too tight. Similarly, if your hat feels loose and shifty on your head and won’t stay in place: Then it’s too big.

Hats are sold in a variety of sizes and sizing-styles, from the standard “S/M/L/XL/XS” to fractioned and whole sizes (7 1/2, 9, 6 1/2 etc) and in centimeter measurements (my hat size, for example, is Size 7, or roughly 57cm, which is about a Medium).

Where to Buy a Hat?

You’re really asking two questions here in my opinion.

1. What hats are there out in the market today?
2. Where can I buy this specific hat that I want?

In the 21st century, with the steady resurgence of classic mens’ headgear, it’s becoming increasingly easy to purchase cheap cotton, wool-felt or even paper-weave hats online ranging in sizes from XS to XL. Or you can go to one of those ‘trendy’ ‘fashion’ clothing stores for the younger set, where hats like those are selling like hotcakes (I know, I used to work in just such a place), and if you’re looking to buy a cheap Trilby or Fedora just to try it on as an experiment and see whether or not you like the whole idea of wearing a hat and if you’re comfortable doing this, I’d recommend one of those shops and one of those more flashy, flowery, ‘out-there’ hats as a way to dip your toes in the water and see whether you like what’s further down in this pool of headwear.

For those of you looking to purchase a proper hat (I apologise if this term seems somewhat derogatory, but it’s true), by which I mean, a hat which looks good, which is made the traditional way, which will last for decades and which you can wear with a variety of outfits, then you can go to the websites of a number of prominent hatmakers and browse their catalogs, select the hat (and most importantly, the SIZE) that fits you, and then make the purchase.

Of course, buying online has one inherent flaw: You can’t try on the hat before you buy it. And unless you’re absolutely damn sure that you know what your hat-size is, I strongly advise caution and research before buying a hat this way.

Okay, great. Now I’ve scared you off of buying a hat online. Where can you buy them ‘in-the-flesh’, so to speak?

If you’re looking for a cheap and/or secondhand hat, trawl places like flea-markets, antiques shops, thrift-shops and those fashiony clothing & accessory shops that I mentioned earlier. There, any hats that you find that you like enough to buy, you can try on before you fork out the cash.

“Yeah but those hats are ugly, old, manky, ripped, loose, tight, stained, frayed, girly…” yadda, yadda, yadda. Yes I know. You want to buy a brand-new hat, but you want to do it properly. You don’t want to risk $100+ on a top-quality hat online which you can’t try on and which might not fit you when you finally get it in your hands, thereby wasting all your money. Now what?

Okay, a simple solution presents itself:

Find a hat-shop. Duh!

Now I realise that the recent history of the hat means that hat-shops are not as plentiful as once they were, which is a great pity, but sometimes, you strike it lucky.

Myself, I live in Melbourne, Australia (if there’s any other Melbournians reading this; take note…) and here in Melbourne, there really is only one place for the discerning hat-wearer to go to. If you want a nice, quality, long-lasting, oldschool felt, straw, Panama, Fedora, Trilby, topper, flat cap, boater etc etc etc etc ad nauseum, there’s really only one shop worth visiting…and I mean that quite literally because it’s the only shop in town. It’s “City Hatters” (for the Melbournians reading this, it’s on the corner of Flinders & Swanston, underneath the Station). I’m fortunate to have this city institution on my doorstep. It’s been operating out of the same shopfront for the past (as of the date of this posting), 101 years.

City Hatters in Melbourne is a traditional mens’ hat-shop and has operated continuously out of the same corner shopfront under Flinders St. Station in Melbourne since it opened in 1910

Now I realise that not every major city (and much less, smaller cities or country towns) have such well-established traditional hat-shops with ribbon-steaming services, brim-repairs and so-forth, but if you are so lucky, drop in at your local hatter’s, ask questions and start trying on lids. These guys will be thankful and appreciative of your patronage and, if they’re anything like the guys at my local hat-shop, will be happy to give you advice about how a hat should fit, feel and look on your head.

A while ago, I wrote a piece on the history of the suit. If you don’t remember it, you can find it here. Recently I started thinking about suits again. I started thinking about what they are and how they’re perceived in society. What they mean. What they evoke and how the suit has changed over the course of history. It’s a fascinating, sad, scary and hopeful and unfortunate saga that plays out almost like some sort of Shakespeare thing that you had to study at school.  So, where do we begin?

Along with men like Fred Astaire, George Raft and the Duke of Windsor, Cary Grant was always impeccably dressed

The Suit Today

In the 21st Century, the suit is viciously ripped apart and herded into one of two different camps. Those who see it as being super straitlaced, uptight, rigid, formal and uncomfortable and…okay who are we kidding? There’s really only one camp. But the point of this article is to show that there needn’t be this one camp and that indeed, this camp shouldn’t exist in the first place. The original purpose and history of the suit which was, as I said in my other article, a cornerstone of style, has been distorted, changed, warped and muddled up over the past fifty-odd years and today, how the public views the average two or three-piece suit, is very different to how the suit was originally viewed, a hundred, eighty, seventy-five and sixty years ago, when suits were worn on an almost daily basis. In this article we’ll look at what the suit traditionally was, how it changed from this to what it is now, and what, in the mind of this blogger at any rate, the suit should always and should continue to be. Let’s begin with the public perception in the 21st Century, of the typical man’s suit…

Perceptions of the Suit

There are two main perceptions of the suit in the 21st Century. Perception #1: A suit is old-fashioned. It’s formal. It’s for ‘special occasions’. It’s stuffy and constricting and uncomfortable and makes you look like a banker or a lawyer, a businessman or a mobster. You wear it for work and for work only. Then, there’s also Perception #2:  A suit is suave and sophistocated, it’s classy. It looks stylish and makes a man feel good, feel interesting, feel important, intelligent, in-control, comfortable, confident…sexy? Maybe that too. So my question is. Why? Why one and why not the other?

If a suit makes you look good. Why don’t more people wear them? And why does the suit have this unfortunate reputation that it does, as outlined in ‘Perception #1’. Is it deserved? Where does it come from? Why do we still have it?

The suit has a reputation of being stuffy and old-fashioned. Overly formal and uncomfortable. You put it on for special occasions and then store it back in your closet until you need it again, like some sort of military dress-uniform that you take out for promotions, parades or special presentations and ceremonies. Like…Weddings. But why should this be so? Where does it come from?

The suit’s current reputation comes from the period after World War Two during the 1960s and 1970s. Suits became synonymous during this period with employment and working and business and jobs. People wore suits all the time and as they say ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’. The suit became associated more and more strongly with work instead of play, with stiffnes and formality instead of relaxation and enjoyment. Because people had to wear them all day at work, it’s likely that they associated them too much with a lack of freedom and therefore, cast them off the moment they weren’t working. But that was never the suit’s job in the first place. It was never designed specifically as a work-uniform, but that’s where it’s been stuck for the last thirty or forty years. Even now in a new century when, with all the mixing and matching we’re doing with clothes, the suit seems to be jammed in some sort of timewarp. Today, when most people think of suits, they imagine TV shows like The Apprentice…

…a sad, but truthful look at the suit in today’s society.

Let’s move away from Perception #1 and move onto Perception #2…

Breaking out of the mould of business and employment, let’s take a look at the social history of the suit and a look at the suit from the other perspective that we have of it: As something classy and sophistocated. You have to understand that the suit wasn’t always seen as some sort of corporate uniform, the way that it might be today. For decades, the suit was seen as a form of, for want of a better and more contemporary term, ‘smart casual’ attire. The suit was the standard set of clothes that a man wore when he was out on the town. When he went out for dinner. When he went to work. When he followed the wife to visit friends or when merely going about his business. A suit used to be a sign of style, good taste, self-respect and confidence and power, sadly replaced it seems, by other qualities that are less indicative of what the suit should respresent: Masculinity and manhood.

So if the suit isn’t formal. Is it casual? If it was worn every day, it must be. But where does it lie on the dresscode scale? Let’s have a look…

At the top we have White Tie. Worn for the most formal of events such as weddings, important state functions and opening night at the theatre. White Tie is rarely worn today by most people except when it’s specifically asked for on an invitation-card.

Below White Tie we have Black Tie. Still fairly common today, Black Tie is worn for semi-formal occasions such as dinners with friends, parties, school or university events and presentations and awards ceremonies (Academy Awards, for example). White Tie is the most formal level of dress in the Western hemisphere. Black Tie, directly below it, is traditionally seen as semiformal dress, worn for more relaxed occasions.

To borrow a term from contemporary English, below Black Tie, we have ‘Smart Casual’. This was the area which up until fairly recently, was the domain of a certain set of clothes: The Suit. The suit was seen as a badge of pride and honour back in the old days. You wore it to show you had style, class and panache. It was the gold standard of men’s attire for well over a century. A man wearing a suit was seen as a snappy dresser who took care and pride in his appearance and who was someone worth taking notice of. Over the decades, suits changed in style, but they never moved from their rung on the wardrobe ladder. Up to the 1940s, a suit almost always had a waistcoat with it, making it a three-piece suit. The reasoning behind this was because it was considered unacceptable to display the white of your shirt. Your shirt was worn under your suit. It was an undergarment like your boxer-shorts or your briefs. Most likely, you only changed your shirt once a week anyway, so there was certainly no expectation that you’d want to show it off. Also, in days before central heating, the waistcoat provided an essential layer of warmth in cold, blustery buildings. Wearing two-piece suits regularly didn’t start becoming popular until after World War Two, when strict cloth-rationing made the manufacture of three-piece suits so much more difficult than it was before the war. Three-piece suits are much harder to find these days than two-pieces, but still, the suit remains.

Pussy Galore and James Bond (Sean Connery) in ‘Goldfinger’, with Bond wearing a three-piece suit

Finally, below the suit, we have street-casual, which is what most people wear today. Slacks. Jeans. Shirts. Pullovers. T-shirts and so forth. Traditionally, clothes such as these were seen as work-clothes. T-shirts, singlets and shirts were seen as underwear that you put on to absorb sweat and perspiration. Jeans were worn when you had heavy labour to do such as gardening, woodchopping, cleaning or any other activity that would’ve been unwise to carry out in a suit.

So as you can see, the suit is far from being some sort of formal, stuffy uniform. And it was never designed to be stuffy, anyway. Suits, when properly tailored and measured, are meant to be perfectly fitting and comfortable. If a suit is uncomfortable for whatever reason, then it’s not the right one for you. But just because a suit looks nice doesn’t mean that it’s automatically formalwear.

Suits: Casual or Formal?

This is the big style and fashion combat ground in the 21st century. Imagine an enormous table with thimbles armed with needles on one side and thread-spools armed with pins on the other with a battle-line of a tailor’s measuring tape running between the two. Where does the suit lie? In formalwear or casualwear? Let’s consider the photograph below for a minute…

Here’s actor Simon Baker wearing a three-piece suit. In no way does this look even remotely formal. Sleeves are up. Jacket’s off, shirt-collar is undone, he’s tieless and his shirtfront is open. This diversity of the suit, to look either elegant or relaxed speaks to me of its lack of formality as opposed to its abundance of it.

So the answer is that the suit does lie in the casualwear camp, and it’s just as well that it should, because that is what it was designed for. That is what it was invented for. That is what it’s meant to be seen as and used as. That’s why the perception of the suit as being a stuffy and formal and rigid uniform is unfounded. Because it simply does not exist. Invitation cards will say “White Tie” or “Black Tie”. Sometimes even “Smart Casual”. They will never say “Wear a suit”. Why? Because a suit isn’t formal. That’s why. And another reason why the suit wavers from formality is because formality is just that. It’s formal. White Tie is White Tie. Black Tie is Black. But a suit isn’t. It changes and alters constantly. Only casual clothes can do that. If you don’t believe me, then look up a fellow named Edward, Duke of Windsor.

Edward, Prince of Wales. Edward VIII of England. Edward the Duke of Windsor.

Edward, Duke of Windsor, with his wife, Wallis, the Duchess of Windsor

Apart from famously abdicating in 1936 to marry an American divorcee (Oh the scandal!), King Edward VIII was famous for one other thing – Rocking the suit. Before big fashion models showed up, the Duke was one of the most photographed men in the world, for his sense of fashion and style. And yet he always wore a suit. But that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t that he wore a suit, but rather what he did with it, changing, mixing, matching, mashing and churning things up. He was a style barometer that told the British people what to wear, how to wear it and if nobody else was wearing it, then he would. I can’t find the source on this, but I remember reading once that the Duke of Windsor was the guy who popularised zip-flies on trousers! Before then, trousers all had button-flies!

If you want more proof that a suit belongs in casualwear, think for a moment about a tuxedo and a suit. A tuxedo MUST be worn as a tuxedo. You can’t chop and change it. A suit is versatile. You can wear it with or without the jacket. You can put the waistcoat on if you’re cold, or you can leave it at home and wear it as a two-piece. You can use the jacket on its own as a sportsjacket or you can use the trousers seperately from the rest of the suit. You can wear the jacket and trousers with a contrasting waistcoat for a more broken up, less solid look and none of this will ever look wrong. It might look different, but never wrong. That’s not something you can say about true formal attire. Again, take a look at the photo of Simon Baker if you need any proof.

When Do You Wear a Suit?

I remember a while back, my father told me: “We should get you a suit. Something that you can wear for graduation”, by which of course, he meant my graduation from my bachelor’s degree at university. Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy! A suit! A suit a suit a suit! I’d never owned a suit before. I was excited and interested and fascinated. I was getting my first suit! I was gonna be a big boy! And then…bam! There it was. My first glimpse into how the suit is seen today. As something special to be dragged out on special occasions, paraded around as something special and unique and then shoved back into a box, like hauling grandpa out of the retirement home for a family reunion to remind people he’s still around before driving him back home at the end of the day.

But why?

Right here, you see the problem. Because suits have been elevated to the level of formalwear (a pedestal it was never supposed to occupy), the suit has been shunted aside to ‘occasional wear’. When’s the right time? When’s the wrong time? There is no right or wrong time to wear a suit. There are times where it might be more or less appropriate to wear one, but as I explained, a suit is casual clothing and therefore, fluid, with no real rules that govern its use. So when do you wear a suit? The answer really is: Whenever you like, so long as it doesn’t get damaged or dirty. After all, that’s what they were invented for. Do you really want to put on a suit only when you have a special occasion? Lying down in a pine box is a special occasion. Is that the only time you want to wear something sharp and snappy? I certainly don’t. So don’t let that be your only time that you’ll be wearing one either. Wear it on nice days. Crappy days. Days when there’s something interesting going on, or on days when there’s nothing on at all. A suit isn’t like a tuxedo that you can only put on after 6:00pm, it’s something you can wear all the time, so embrace it and do it and feel good about it.

Concluding Remarks

Okay. So where am I going with all this? The point of this posting is not to try and get every Tom, Dick, Harry, George and Michael into a suit…that would take far too much fabric anyway…but rather to try and destroy some misconceptions that have sprung up over the last thirty or forty years about the suit. The point of this posting is to clearly demonstrate the position of the suit and to illustrate that its current and unfortunate reputation that it holds, is unfounded, unwarranted and above all, unnecessary. The suit is a fine and elegant set of clothes, but that doesn’t make it formal or stuffy or straitlaced. It doesn’t make it rigid or tight or anything else along those lines. A suit is meant to suggest style, comfort, sophistocation and relaxation. After all, the suit’s full name is a lounge suit. So go ahead and lounge around in it. Be relaxed and casual, as the suit was meant to be. If you have a suit, don’t lock it away in the cedar cupboard up in the attic. Yank it it out, put it on and go out for a wander. We all want to look sharp and elegant. And it’s easy to be so. It just requires the shaking off of dust and a bit of a courage to do it. In today’s world of torn jeans, logo T-shirts and baseball caps, anyone wearing a suit will stand out as a sharp and shining example of manhood, confidence, style and sensibility. Be like the man who was king and rule the suit. Leave the Levis and the Piping Hot at home; suit up and step out.

I think I should start this off by saying that this isn’t a fashion and style blog and it ain’t a menswear blog. It’s a history blog. I won’t be covering every single itty-bitty-titty-kitty detail about the do’s, the don’ts and the faux-pas of how to and how not to wear a tux. If that’s what you came here for, then you probably won’t find it.

The tuxedo is the ultimate men’s uniform. You see it at fancy parties, awards ceremonies, Christmas balls, royal gatherings, state dinners, weddings and anniversary celebrations. James Bond would never be seen without one. But it seems like these days, nobody really knows what a tuxedo is. They have a vague idea that it’s black and white and it’s mandatory daily attire for penguins…but that’s about it. What is a tuxedo, what makes up a tuxedo, when do you wear one? Why?…And why the hell is it called a ‘tuxedo’ anyway? That’s what this article is about.

All dressed up and no place to go…

The History of the Tuxedo

The tuxedo was born in the late Victorian era. By the 1870s and 1880s, people looking for a night out in snappy clothes were looking for a snappier alternative to having to wear glitzy, glamorous, over-colourful clothes that made them look like clowns. Stuff like frock-coats, cravats, buckled shoes and coloured waistcoats other articles of clothing, simply did not say “classy night on the town”. They wanted something simple, easy and sharp that would always look good. Black and white. Crisp and elegant. Enter the tuxedo.

The tuxedo was born in England in the 19th century. Elements of it had existed ever since Georgian times, but it wasn’t until the second half of the 1800s that the tuxedo really began to emerge in the form that we know it today. To understand how it came about, we need to understand when it was worn.

Victorian high society was all about social connections. Who you were depended on what you did, how you did it, who you did it with and who you knew. Connections and friendships were important. The way to meet people was at big social gatherings, events like garden parties, balls, dinner parties, luncheons, high teas and sporting-events. There was no Twitter, no FaceBook, no MySpace back then. You had to go out and find people to talk to!

Of course, part of being received in upper-class society was knowing what to wear. And you didn’t just wear anything to any occasion. There were amazingly strict wardrobe rules for every single event for every single hour of the day. There was morning dress, daytime dress and evening dress. The tuxedo fell under the umbrella of “Evening Dress”, meaning that you put it on after the sun went down. Typically, this meant changing into your tuxedo after six o’clock in the evening or at sundown (whichever came first). This is also why the black tuxedo jacket is also called a ‘dinner jacket’. The tuxedo was further broken down into “Evening Dress” and “Full Evening Dress”. Here’s where things can get complicated.

Black and White

‘Tuxedo’ is a very loose term. Like I said, people generally have a vague idea of what it is, and that’s all. But it’s rather more complicated than that. Traditional men’s evening dress is divided into two categories. Evening Dress and Full Evening Dress.

‘Evening Dress’ is the classic tuxedo. Also called ‘Black Tie’. A black dinner-jacket, a white dress-shirt with studs and a detatchable collar and french cuffs which had to be held shut with cufflinks and, as the name suggests…a black bowtie. Evening Dress was worn during semiformal social occasions between friends and professional acquaintenaces that took place after sundown, typically dinner, nights at the theatre or when providing private entertainment. Black Tie is what most people are familiar with today as being the classic tuxedo and which tends to end up as the dress-code on most formal social-event invitations.

The pieces of a traditional Black Tie tuxedo included…

Black one or two-button dinner-jacket or ‘Tuxedo’ jacket.
Black Tuxedo trousers.
Black low-cut Tuxedo waistcoat (optional. If you wear this, wear suspenders; ditch the cummerbund)
Black patent-leather shoes.
Black socks.
White dress-shirt with studs and cufflinks.
Black bowtie.
Cummerbund (that goes around the waist) or a pair of black suspenders that go over the shoulder, hidden by the jacket (which is usually kept closed).

Pierce Brosnan as James Bond wearing Black Tie

Less common today is the more formal ‘White Tie’ enssemble, which people tend to confuse. There are very few White Tie events that call for a dress-code like this, so people aren’t always aware of what to wear or what to expect.

German bandleader Max Raabe wearing classic White Tie complete with waistcoat, dress-shirt and studs, white bowtie and detatchable wing-collar

‘White Tie’ is the highest level of formality in male attire. White Tie is the kind of stuff you put on when you’re going to meet the Queen. The components of White Tie traditionally include…

Black tailcoat.
Black tuxedo trousers.
Black patent-leather shoes.
Black socks.
White, collarless dress-shirt, held shut with shirt-studs.
White detatchable wing-collar, held onto the shirt with collar-studs.
White bowtie. As the collar doesn’t fold down to hide the tie, it must be one that the wearer can tie. Not a clip-on.
White, low-cut waistcoat, usually with three or four buttons. For a time, black waistcoats of a similar cut were popular, but white is the most traditional.

In searching YouTube for those hideous “modern fashion-and-style guide” videos, I came across one that said that the only difference between Black and White Tie is that you change the jacket from black to white…WRONG! Black Tie is Black Tie, White Tie is White Tie. They are not interchangable and they are not synonymous. Show up for a White Tie event wearing a Black Tie enssemble and you’ll probably be kicked out.

Traditionally, studs and cufflinks would be white or mother-of-pearl. During funerals or wakes, especially during Victorian times, it was acceptable to wear black studs and links, as they were part of acceptable Victorian mourning-jewellery (jewellery that was jet black, in order to reflect the solemnity of the occasion). A thin and discreet dress-watch is one of the acceptable choices of timepiece for Black or White Tie. The best option is a gold chain and pocketwatch or no watch at all (wearing a watch suggests that you need to keep an eye on the time because you have somewhere else to be. And if you’re busy on the night that you’re attending a Black or White Tie event, then you really shouldn’t be there anyway!)

When to Wear Black or White?

Although both are only ever worn after six o’clock in the evening, as I said above, Black Tie and White Tie are not interchangable and one does not stand in for the other. So when do you wear what?

Black Tie is usually worn for events such as going out to dinner with friends, going to a friend’s house for a party, going to the theatre, attending a dance or a party and attending institutional functions, such as those held by schools or universities. You wear Black Tie when you go out for a classical concert or an evening at Carnegie Hall.

White Tie is worn for only the most exclusive of social functions. State dinners, meeting heads of state, attending the Opening Night of a theatre-production and attending evening weddings. White Tie is for those events where you need to know people in order to get one of those handwritten, security-watermarked invitations to get past the security guys wearing sunglasses and black T-shirts to enter the glitzy ballroom filled with celebrities.

The Tuxedo Through the Times

The modern Black and White Tie enssembles started showing up in the late Victorian-era as an alternative to the more colorful and flashy clothes that were typically worn by men of the period. Black Tie and White Tie were on the rise during the 1880s and through to the 20th century, reaching a peak around the 1920s-1950s, when it was popular to go out nightclubbing or fancy restaurants to see famous jazz-orchestras putting on a show or seeing great West End or Broadway Shows, which boomed during this interwar and immediate postwar era. Starting in the 1930s, the white dinner-jacket began to replace the traditional black or midnight blue one (as seen below) when a more comfortable alternative was needed when wearing Black Tie in a warm or tropical climate. Black absorbs heat so wearing full traditional Black Tie in a place like Florida or Singapore would be far too uncomfortable. White, which doesn’t absorb heat, was the natural and acceptable alternative.

During the 1920s, 30s and 40s, some swing-jazz big-bands would give live performances dressed in Black or White Tie. Occasionally, their version of Black or White Tie would be slightly altered so that party-guests wouldn’t mistake the musicians for other guests or staff working at the performance venue.

In the above photo, you can see Benny Goodman (front, with clarinet) and His Orchestra performing; ca. 1938. Bandmembers are wearing Black Tie, but with a more informal white jacket instead of the more traditional black, possibly to differentiate themselves from the audience. Sometimes, bandmembers would wear Black Tie while the bandleader would wear White Tie in order to make him stand out to the audience, such as in this photograph of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra taken in 1921:

Whiteman may be seen wearing White Tie (second from right, standing next to the pianist) while the other bandmembers wear Black Tie

Where did ‘Tuxedo’ Come From?

They’ve always been called ‘Black Tie’ or ‘White Tie’, differentiated by the colour of the bowtie and the presence or lack of a white waistcoat, but why do we also call them ‘Tuxedos’? Where did this term come from?

To be clear, the ‘Tuxedo’ is not the full getup. Traditionally, the ‘tuxedo’ was the black dinner-jacket. It wasn’t until later that the word ‘Tuxedo’ referred to the jacket and the black trousers as well. The word ‘Tuxedo’ comes from the town of Tuxedo Park in New York State in the United States of America.

Black Tie and White Tie Today

White Tie isn’t as common today as it used to be, unless you’re a filthy rich billionaire going to a charity fundraising dinner-party or something, at least. Black Tie still remains fairly common though, although it seems that there will always be a number of people who don’t know what it is or how to wear it…President Barack Obama for one…

…If you haven’t figured out what’s wrong here, Obama’s missing the wing-collar which goes under the bowtie and he’s missing the white waistcoat as well. Obama is supposedly famous for his high-fashion faux-pas…

Looking for more information? Then check out the Black Tie Guide, the definitive internet authority on Black and White Tie, what it is, how to wear it, where it came from and what makes it up.

Jeans. Blue jeans. Demin jeans. Love them or loathe them, these sturdy blue trousers are here to stay. In the 21st century, almost everyone wears jeans, even your humble blogger here, grudgingly though he might, yes, he does wear jeans.

I’ll admit it. Jeans are not my first preference for legwear. But they do have their time and they do have their place. And even more interestingly, they also have their history. Where did jeans come from? How long have they been around? Why are they called ‘Jeans’? And what is denim, anyway? Why are they riveted together like the Golden Gate Bridge and what is the purpose of that tiny pocket in the corner?

Deminmental Developments

Almost all jeans on earth are made from a material called denim. What is it and where did it come from? Denim is actually a cotton fabric, although it probably feels very different than the singlet or the T-shirt that you’re wearing right now. The reason for this is because denim is woven differently, to give it strength and the ability to put up with all kinds of rugged use, misuse and tortoruous abuse. Although this isn’t set in stone, the majority of denim comes in a stereotypical blue colour. This is achieved by dying the denim in an indigo-blue dye which, when dry, turns the denim a dark blue, which eventually fades lighter and lighter as the years and wash-cycles in your washing-machine, gradually wear down the colour of the dye over the years.

But probably most importantly…where does the name ‘denim’ come from?

The original super-strong denim fabric was actually a type of serge manufactured in France. Named after the town where this particular type of cloth was produced, the material became known as Serge de Nimes, (‘Nimes’ being a town in France). Eventually, the word was shortened, broken down, rebuilt and Serge de Nimes…became…Serge de Nimes…Denim.

The History of Modern Jeans

Inventing the material and the distinctive blue hue was one thing. Finding out what the hell to DO with this fascinating fabric was another.

Jeans were invented in the mid-19th century. The robust, easily-washed denim fabric was just what tailors needed to manufacture trousers for the working man that were strong, hard-wearing and which could put up with such rigorous occupations such as farming, ranching, mining, construction-work and general hard labour. It was into this world of hard-wearing clothing that a man named Levi Strauss entered in the 1850s.

Strauss was born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1829. The home of beer, sausages and in a hundred years from then, BMW. Soon, Bavaria would be able to lay claim as being the birthplace of the guy who brought us modern jeans.

In 1847, Strauss, his mother and sisters sailed to the New World and settled in the United States of America. In 1853, Strauss found himself in the rapidly-expanding city of San Francisco, where he founded his famous Levi Strauss company, manufacturing blue-jeans. In the 1850s, California was undergoing a massive gold-rush, and miners and prospectors would have needed sturdy clothing which could put up with rock-scrapes, water, mud, snags from pickaxes and shovels and a whole lot more. Strauss was in the right place at the right time.

Fantastic as denim was for making jeans, Strauss soon discovered that the jeans were only as strong as the seams which held them together. One of Strauss’s customers was a man named Jacob Davis, who moved to San Francisco in the 1860s, shortly after the end of the American Civil War. Davis was a tailor by profession, and he had experimented with copper rivets, which he used when he made things like harnesses, hammocks and tents, to give them extra strength. Excellent as Herr Strauss’s trousers were, Davis found that, in spite of denim’s strength, the trousers kept ripping from all the hard work they had to do. In an experiment, Davis applied rivets to all the stress-areas on the jeans, in an effort to strengthen them – On the pocket-edges, around the fly, at the hips and so-forth.

When this experiment proved to be successful, Davis decided to take out a patent on his new invention. When he discovered he didn’t have the money to apply for a patent, he approached Strauss with his discovery instead. Strauss agreed to help Davis fund his patent and in the 1870s, the two men formed a partnership, creating their new and improved blue-jeans!

“Jeans” actually comes from the French words “Bleu de Genes” (literally “Blue of Genoa”).

Blue Jeans Today

The history of jeans is long and interesting. Originally, they weren’t even called jeans! Up until 1960, Levi Strauss called his creation “waist overalls”. Unlike conventional overalls, that went right up from your ankles to your chest with straps to go over your shoulders, “waist overalls” merely went up to your waist, where they were held up by either a belt or suspenders. Jeans have remained popular as a working-man’s set of trousers because of their toughness. During wartime, factory-workers often wore denim jeans because they guarded against dangerous liquids, sparks and other hazards that were to be found inside places like production-lines and munitions factories.

Because of their status as working-trouserse, jeans were often looked down on in polite society. It wasn’t until after the middle of the 20th century that dress-codes were relaxed enough to allow the wearing of jeans as regular trousers. Restaurants, cinemas and nightclubs would sometimes ban patrons from entering if they were attired in jeans because they weren’t seen as respectable. It’s believed that jeans started being worn as regular trousers in the 1960s and 70s, when teenagers, rebellious as always, looked for something more interesting to wear, apart from suits and slacks. Some boys probably found their fathers’ old 1940s jeans in his closet, which he wore as a factory-worker during the War and put them on, and the trend began.

The Enigmatic Fifth Pocket

Nearly all modern jeans have five pockets. Two at the back, one on the front left, and two on the front right, with the fifth pocket nestled neatly inside the front right pocket. What is it there for?

Popular belief will tell you it’s for keys, condoms, loose-change, cellphones, cigarette-lighters, boxes of matches or chewing-gum, but it’s actually not for any of those at all.

The fifth pocket was introduced to blue jeans around the turn of the century and their original purpose was to hold a pocket-watch. Although this may seem hard to believe (what with the shape of fifth-pockets on jeans in the 21st century), it is, nonetheless…true. A classic pair of jeans, such as Levi 501s, will typically have a fifth pocket which is comparatively large, compared with some others that can be found today, and the reason for that is because it was designed to hold pocket-watches. Even today, most good-sized jeans which are manufactured to traditional measurements will still be able to house quite comfortably, a 16-size pocket-watch, with the watch’s ring-clip chain clipping to the nearest belt-loop around the front of your jeans. If anyone reading this owns a pocket-watch and wants to try this out…go ahead. It does work. Here’s the proof:

That’s actually a closeup of me wearing my own jeans! The chain is a gold-plated, ring-clip watch-chain, clipped to the belt-loop, with my railroad pocket-watch tucked into the fifth pocket. So the next time someone asks you what that pocket is for…you can tell them!

Okay, perhaps “never see” is a bit strong…but there was a time, not too long ago where men wore nice, glittery accessories too. Jewellery has never been just for the womenfolk, you know. Men have been wearing jewellery for years, decades, centuries…but somewhere along the line, the classic set of men’s jewellery fell by the wayside, to be replaced by stainless steel, grills on the teeth, tattoos, fake, gold-plated chains, fake, gold-plated rings and earrings which would look more at home on the end of a bull than dangling from a man’s earlobe.

Proper masculine jewellery has seen a shocking decline in recent years. Now we have gold-plated watches, gold-plated necklaces and chains, gold-plated rings and more piercings than an embroidered quilt. And if piercings around the eyes, ears and mouth aren’t bad enough, men’s ‘jewellery’ has recently taken a more southerly route, along the lines of Prince Albert piercings and other delightful decorative detritus (if you don’t know what a Prince Albert piercing is, don’t ask).

This article is about the classic pieces of mens’ jewellery that people used to wear, back when the world was stylish, people had more self-respect for their appearance and looking good meant more than merely working out at the gym. We enter a world of cufflinks, tie-bars, collar-bars, shirt-studs and watch-chains, a world of rings and necklaces and clips which looked like gold and silver because that was what they were made of. We enter the unopened case of mens’ jewellery…

Starting at the Top…

Unlike womens’ jewellery, mens’ jewellery usually served a double-purpose of being both decorative, but also practical and useful at the same time. And the amount of jewellery that men could wear was considerable, even without all these modern and sight-searing invaders. So what did men wear back in the day?

As I said, men’s jewellery was practical as well as pretty and a lot of it was used in conjunction with clothing. The standard, white dress-shirt took up a lot of the jewellery on a man’s dressing-table, which is quite an achievement in itself. The following articles of jewellery were typically tacked, tied, tangled or thrust into a shirt to either hold it together or give it extra sparkle.

Cufflinks

Cufflinks…classic mens’ jewellery. The kind of things that wives give their DHs in those classic movies from the 40s and 50s in those touching, family-friendly Christmas & birthday scenes. Cufflinks have been around for over a hundred years, since the mid 1800s right up until today. Their purpose, as the name suggests, is to link the cuffs together. The cuffs being the shirt-cuffs on the ends of your sleeves.

“Yeah but all shirts have buttons on the cuffs. What do you want me to do? Cut them off!?”

Not all shirts have buttons, silly! Formal dress-shirts, button-down long-sleeved shirts and business-shirts made by various clothing-manufacturers used to (and still do) make shirts with what are called “French Cuffs”.

French cuffs are twice as long as ordinary cuffs, and don’t contain any buttons, but instead contain four (or sometimes, six) buttonholes on each cuff. The cuffs are folded back on each other so that the buttonholes line up, and then the cuff is pinched together so that it makes a raindrop shape. The cufflinks are then pushed through the buttonholes to hold the cuff together.

A shirtsleeve with French cuffs. Note how the cuff is folded back before the cufflink is passed through the buttonholes to hold it together

Most pairs of cufflinks came in a distinctive T-bar design, with the link being pushed through the buttonhole to have a small metal tab flip out the bottom (forming a shape something like a seriffed letter “I”). Cufflinks could be plain steel ones, or they could be (and usually were) ornate and decorative pieces of jewellery with pearls, diamonds, lapis lazuli, bloodstone and other precious, semi-precious or just plain preposterous decorative stones or other materials included in them to give them extra bling.

Shirt-Studs

The classic dress-shirt does seem to be lacking in the department of buttony goodness, doesn’t it? If a shirt didn’t have cuff-buttons, then it would surely have something to hold the bloody FRONT together!…Right?

No, actually.

So, enter shirt-studs.

Shirt-studs were a bit like cufflinks, only they came in sets of more than just two, often four or more; and their job was to hold together the front of a shirt (like what…oh I dunno…BUTTONS? do?) in a stylish and decorative manner. Unlike cufflinks, though, which could be shiny and decorative and all that stuff, shirt-studs usually had to be a certain colour to go with the shirt which they were being worn with. They were made up of two small discs of metal, held together by a very short length of chain. One disc passed through both buttonholes in the shirt (one at the front, one behind) to hold it shut, and in the end, you’d have a row of shirt-studs going through the sets of buttonholes on your shirtfront, giving you a nice, uniform appearance.

Collar-Studs

Having done up your cuffs and your shirtfront, it was time to put on your collar.

Wait…what?

Yes. Your collar. In the old days, shirts did not come with collars. They were detachable (as were some cuffs, by the way). The reason for this was because that most men wore shirts for days or even weeks at a time before taking them off, but would change cuffs and collars frequently. If the shirt you have doesn’t need a collar tacked onto it, ignore this. Otherwise…

…Shirts with detatchable collars lasted well into the Twentieth Century; these are the classic, stiff, starched collars that you hear grandmother or grandfather complaining about having to wash (and wear) when they were children. They were held onto the top of the shirt with a set of collar-studs (or pre-sewn buttons, if you had them). Putting on a collar like this could be quite an ordeal, as Roald Dahl found it, when he mentioned struggling into his school uniform in his autobiography “Boy: Tales of Childhood”. But…people will go through anything for fashion (which is true of any period, not just of the early 20th Century!).

With your cufflinks, shirt-studs and collar-studs on, you now had to do up your tie. But you don’t like how your collar flops around and doesn’t stay where it’s meant to…and it’s wiggling your tie all over the place. Relax. That’s why the collar-bar was invented!

The Collar-Bar

I admit that I was rather ignorant of this piece of jewellery until fairly recently (if you can call it jewellery, more like an accessory). The collar-bar is a bar or rod of metal used to hold the two ends of the collar under your chin, in-place, and to stop them from going where they’re not meant to. Collar-bars could also be used to keep a tie in-check and stop it flopping around. There were three kinds of collar-bars…

– Pins and Needles

These were rather basic collar-bars; they poked through the fabric of the collar (a bit like a safety-pin) to hold the collar together and down. Not the best kind if you didn’t want your collars full of unnecessary holes!

– Pinch it

The second variety of collar-bar had miniature clamps at each end; these clamps…uh…clamped onto the wings of your collar and kept it down and close together. Tidier and without risk of being pricked by a sharp pin.

– Push and Pull

The last collar-bar was used with collars which had pre-manufactured holes in the collar-wings. The final variety of collar-bar was pushed through these holes and held the collar in-place.

Tie-Bars

Often associated with businessmen or detectives wearing two-piece suits, the tie-bar is a simple clip or slide which holds a necktie together to stop the two ends flapping around and getting out-of-line. Tie-bars were sometimes sold along with cufflinks as a three-piece set of two links and a tie-bar all in one.

Rings

Some people wear rings for individuality. Some wear rings to show membership to a certain group of people. A school, a club, a company, a university or a certain organisation. But in the “old days”, not many men wore rings. But the rings that they did wear were real marks of individuality, which would stand out even more today than they did a hundred years ago.

These days, wearing a wedding-ring is something done by both sexes. However, it may surprise you to know that it wasn’t until pretty recently that men as well as women, started wearing weddings to show their marital status.

Signet-rings were traditionally the man’s ring of choice. They had the man’s coat of arms (either his own personal arms, or those of his family) or his monogram (initials) engraved on the ring in mirror-fashion, so as the ring could be used to seal documents with sealing-wax. While this function of the ring (which is what it was designed for) is largely obsolete these days; having a signet-ring made for you and wearing one is certainly one way to make yourself stand out. If you want a unique, personal piece of jewellery that looks good, think about one of those. After all, class-rings, university rings, school rings and graduation-rings are all descended from this one, humble band of gold with a few knife-scratches in the top of it.

Reading an article a few days ago about the movement to “stop the sag” and to ask people to haul up their trousers, pants and jeans so that decent people didn’t have to check out the cut of your briefs, boxers, boxer-briefs or the fact that you weren’t wearing any undergarments at all, inspired me to write this article on the cornerstone of men’s clothing: The Suit.

Not too long ago and within living memory, men knew how to dress acceptably. Somewhere along the way, it became commonplace to wear jeans, shorts, logo’d T-shirts and all manner of other, shocking invaders of style which are now considered “normal” clothing. I’ve always been a very old-fashioned, conservative and formal sort of person (there, I said it), and I lament the fact that such fashion-phenomena such as “sagger jeans” have become as acceptable as doing burnouts and doughnuts in the local parking-lot with your father’s BMW. Fortunately, all is not lost, and if those gaudy, glitzy and flamboyant photographs that we see online, from fashion-shows are anything to go by, a more formal and respectable mode of men’s clothing may soon be on the rebound.

It was common, until about the 1960s, for men to wear a suit, be it single-breasted, double-breasted, two or three-piece, tweed, wool or of some other, less-desirable fabric. In the 60s and 70s, with T-shirts, jeans and sneakers marching into stores all over the place, this era of elegance, style and sophistication was swept aside like so many decades of dust. So…the suit. What is it? Why did people wear it? What went with it and how did it all go together?

For the purpose of ease-of-understanding, the ‘suit’ referred to in this article will be the classic, three-piece suit:

A typical three-piece suit, with jacket, waistcoat and trousers

The Suit: A History

The classic man’s suit, as we know it today, was born in the 17th and 18th centuries. For a long time, men wore knee-breeches, stockings, flashy tailcoats and shirts with ruffled collars and cuffs. In the mid 1600s, King Charles II introduced a garment which Samuel Pepys records as being a ‘vest’; a sleeveless garment with pockets and buttons and buttonholes down the front. Although originally called a ‘vest’, it receives its alternate name, the ‘waistcoat’ because this new garment was cut and shaped so that it literally reached to just above the waistline. The first piece of the three-piece suit had been created.

The next things to come along were trousers and the fitted suit-jacket or suit-coat. Previous to the late 1700s, men wore knee-breeches. A rough, 21st-century equivalent might be three-quarter jeans. The legs of the breeches reached to knee-level (hence the name knee-breeches) and the remainder of the leg, from the knee downwards, was covered up by long stockings, which were alternatively either buckled or buttoned to the bottom of the breeches to stop them slipping down.

The suit-jacket was evolved from the long tailcoats that men used to wear. These were usually loose and flappy. But one man started changing this. His name was George Bryan Brummell. He lived from 1778-1840. Does his name sound familiar? It should. Or if it doesn’t…perhaps you recognise his other name…Beau Brummell.

Typical men’s clothing of the 18th century, until Brummell decided that this had to change. Here, you can see the tailcoat, the knee-breeches and the mandatory white stockings and buckled shoes

George ‘Beau’ Brummell was the man who changed mens’ fashion forever. In the late 1700s, he introduced what we would now call the three-piece suit, to society. Brummell’s suit was made up of a matching coat, waistcoat and knee-breeches (later, trousers), made from the same cloth with the same pattern. The clothing was intended to be comfortable, less flamboyant, more conservative and better-fitting. From the late 1700s until the 1950s, the suit retained all these three features: Coat, waistcoat and trousers and it remained the backbone of respectable male attire for over a hundred years.

What’s in a Suit?

The three-piece suit is made up of…three pieces. Duh! But what are they?

Jacket

Suit-jackets have between two-to-four buttons, depending on its size. A good-fitting jacket should have sleeves that come down to the first knuckle of your thumb when your arms are hanging by your sides. The jacket would have between four to five pockets, depending on the design. The breast-pocket of the jacket is used to hold a handkerchief (folded as a pocket-square) or alternatively, a pocket-watch (which would be affixed to the jacket’s lapel buttonhole with a leather fob-strap). The lapel buttonhole usually held a flower or a small, decorative trinket. There was a time when you could buy little tube-like vases which you could slip into your buttonhole. You filled the little receptacle with water so that your flower could survive a bit longer than it would if it was just cut off and stuck in there. The T-bar of a pocket-watch’s leather watch-strap should go through the lapel buttonhole from the front of the jacket, not the back, so that the T-bar itself is neatly hidden from view.

Waistcoat

Waistcoats come in several varieties: Single-breasted, double-breasted, two-pocket, four-pocket, belted, unbelted, silk-backed or plain. They’re like Heinz Ketchup of men’s clothing.

A four-pocket, six-button single-breasted waistcoat. Traditionally, the last button on a waistcoat (with six or more buttons in total), is left undone. This style was supposedly established by Edward VII, who habitually left the last button of his waistcoat undone, either by chance or design. Soon, his subjects started copying him

A good waistcoat was designed to be close-fitting, with the bottoms of the arm-holes going directly under the armpits of the wearer and the bottom hem of the coat reaching around the hip-bones. Waistcoats could be either double or single-breasted. Most people are familiar with the single-breasted variety, though. More expensive waistcoats came with silk backs instead of wool like the rest of the waistcoat would be. Waistcoats with belted backs allowed the back of the garment to be taken in or let out to a certain extent to provide for a better fit. Waistcoats come with either two or four pockets, depending again, on the size and style of the waistcoat.

A grey, two-pocket, six-button double-breasted waistcoat. Double-breasted garments were popular in colder countries because the fold of the cloth prevented wind from entering the coat through the gaps in the buttonholes

“How do you wear a pocket-watch with a waistcoat?”

Before wristwatches came along in the 1910s, every man who wore a watch, wore a pocket watch and chain. How was this attached to the waistcoat? Where’s the elusive ‘watch-pocket’? And how did men get their chains to hang so nicely from their waistcoats?

Firstly, there is no real ‘watch-pocket’ on a waistcoat. The watch-pocket was simply any one of the four (or two) pockets which the pocket-watch was placed in. Attaching the chain to the waistcoat, however, took a bit more skill.

There are two chains which you can wear with a waistcoat: The Albert and the Double Albert. Who’s Albert? Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. He was the man who created the Double Albert chain, which was named after him. By extension, the single T-bar chain was thereafter called the “Albert” or “Single Albert”. But enough about Albert.

To attach a T-bar chain to a waistcoat, you need to fold the T-bar up against the chain so that the chain and T-bar are parallel to each other. Then, you push the T-bar and the chain through your selected buttonhole and then pull back on the chain until the T-bar catches against the buttonhole. The T-bar should be at right-angles to the buttonhole so that it doesn’t come back out. With the T-bar in, you simply push the button through the hole like you always would. The button keeps the T-bar in place and stops it wiggling around. Don’t worry, this won’t hurt the waistcoat in any way.

Selecting the best buttonhole to put the T-bar into is up to personal choice, but generally, the button which is closest to the top of the watch-pocket, or a middle button on the waistcoat, is preferrable, because this gives the chain a nice, balanced look with the top of the watch-pocket. A pocket watch and Albert chain can be worn with either single or double-breasted waistcoats, but Double Albert chains will only work (acceptably) with single-breasted. Wearing a Double-Albert chain with a double-breasted waistcoat will get you arrested by Inspector Jeeves of the Fashion & Style Police Department.

Trousers

Unlike jeans, cargo pants and shorts for which ‘sagging’ has sadly become an accepted manner of wearing garments that cover the legs, trousers that hang halfway off your ass and dangle so low your dingle would flop out if you sneezed, are not acceptable in any way, shape, manner or form in any area of the universe at all. Doing this will also involve Jeeves dragging you off to jail for a crime against acceptable dressing.

Trousers should be comfortably held around the waist by nothing but your own body. Or, if your own body isn’t sufficiently padded to carry out this gravity-defying stunt, then a belt (or more acceptably, braces/suspenders) should be used to keep your trousers at an acceptable and non-arrested-by-the-cops-for-indecent-expsoure level. Traditionally, suspenders were buttoned or clipped onto the waistband of your trousers, and you can still get trousers with suspender-buttons, or you can just sew them on yourself. The bottom hems of your trouser-legs should reach around your ankles.

The Modern History of the Three-Piece Suit

With all that, you have the three elements that make up the classic three-piece suit. From its creation in the late 18th century up until the 1950s, this mode of dressing was almost mandatory amongst men. It was a sort of unwritten code of acceptable dressing. To appear in public without your jacket and waistcoat without an acceptable reason (such as doing dirty work) was pretty much equivalent to streaking butt-naked through church on Sunday. In the colder climates around the world, such as the northern U.S. states, the United Kingdom and Europe, or in the colder, southern countries such as southern Australia and New Zealand, wearing a three-piece suit was not only fashionable and stylish, but also necessary. The suit kept your body warm and the waistcoat provided a very necessary extra level of padding and warmth against freezing winter temperatures.

The downfall of the three-piece suit started, like with so many other nice things from history, with the Second World War.

During WWII, if you’ve read my article on life on the homefront during the War (see the “WWII” area of this blog), you’ll know that cloth (amongst several other things) was heavily rationed, due to the necessity for making uniforms for service-personnel. This drastic rationing of cloth meant that it was impossible for tailors to continue making the three-piece suit. The extra fabric needed to make the waistcoat just couldn’t be found. And it was because of this that the two-piece suit became more fashionable in the postwar years, although it survived (if only just) into the 1970s, when disco-music brought it back into fashion.

Today, the three-piece suit hasn’t exactly returned to mainstream fashion, although there are people who still wear them on a regular basis. The waistcoat, a four-hundred year old article of clothing, has returned to fashion lately, and movies like the recent “Sherlock Holmes” one have encouraged designers to experiement (with questionable results) with traditional male attire. Although considering it was perfect to begin with, one wonders what there is to experiment with. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And a three-piece suit made entirely of denim is unlikely to sell anytime soon.