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.