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When talking about menswear lately, the conversation often turns to the question of where suiting is heading. Will it keep evolving, cycle back to the past—or go away entirely? Or to put it more succinctly: Is the death of the suit drawing near?
For me, the question is hardly academic. Like many other men who aren’t required to dress up for work, I haven’t been as eager to wear a suit these past few years as I once was. Unless the situation really calls for it, I’m more inclined to pull on a sweater, jeans, and some Nikes than to fuss with a button-up, a tie, and a pair of longwings.
And I’m not alone in my ambivalence. A surge of interest in suiting, especially among younger men, developed in the years immediately after the beginning of the Great Recession. For the first time in what seemed like generations, many guys became new traditionalists, obsessing over the minutiae of their wardrobe: structured versus unstructured jackets, the best knot for your tie, and where pants should break over the shoes. Blame Mad Men, maybe—or Tumblr.
According to Scott Goble, manager of the influential San Francisco shop MAC Modern Appealing Clothing, the question of where tailoring is going is “something that we at MAC discuss every season.” The suiting industry is changing, he says, and “struggling to find relevance in a modern world that is seemingly more and more casual—especially here at ground zero of the tech industry, where guys are notoriously underdressed.”
That’s not to say it’s all guys in hoodies and shower slides—the classic Mark Zuckerberg look—or Steve Jobs–esque black turtlenecks, but the suit definitely doesn’t have the place in the culture, as men’s default go-to, that it once did.
With customers’ recent rejection of formality and embrace of comfort, then, brands have begun to reconsider suiting’s most established features. Younger designers are questioning the fundamentals of tailoring itself: Does it have to conform to the body? Without buttons, or even lapels, would it still be a suit?
Upstart labels like Public School and Abasi Rosborough have introduced elements from activewear, producing suit jackets with raglan sleeves and zipper, tie, or Velcro closures. Or consider the cult London brand 1205, whose designer, Paula Gerbase, once worked on Savile Row. Her Fall menswear included elegantly cut suits crafted from lightweight nylon that retained the elegance of tailoring but wedded it to the ease of sportswear.
More established labels have taken the question even further. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, for example, seems to be waging a private war against the suit of late. Her Fall 2015 Homme Plus line included beautifully asymmetrical examples, their forms torqued out of kilter and cut on the bias. “Unsurprisingly,” Goble says, “Comme is at the forefront of this discussion, and continues, season after season, to address changes in menswear attitudes through deconstruction and reconstruction.”
Indeed, Kawakubo has said that the theme of her Spring collection is “broken tailoring.” With suit jackets and trousers marked by structural slashes, the designer seems to be negating the suit itself—or perhaps denying its need to even exist. The Fall 2016 collection she showed in Paris last month reconstituted suiting with armadillo-like plates of fabric armor, suggesting that if the suit is to persevere, it will be as a vehicle for self-preservation.
Of course, the suit hasn’t gone away completely, and there are still occasions that call for one. With two friends’ weddings coming up in Los Angeles and San Francisco later this month, I’m determined to try an experiment. I’ll don a different “reimagined” suit to each event, and see how they fare in what’s traditionally been a dressier environment. To the L.A. wedding, an afternoon ceremony for an art-curator couple being held in a garden in Silver Lake, I’ll wear the anorak-like N.Hoolywood suit. For the other wedding, a 1920s-murder-mystery-themed union of two Bay Area techies, I’m considering going with one of the slashed Comme des Garçons deconstructions.
It will be interesting to see how other guests react. Will I be better off in a suit that provides protection, or in one that’s already been torn asunder?
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