The Reason Suits Lost Their Meaning

And why that might be the best thing that ever happened to tailoring

There’s a remnant from the last editorial — The Honest Way to Love Tailoring.

In that piece, I spent time deeply crystallizing the true meaning of ‘craftsmanship’ and the value behind a sartorial piece — that ‘artistry and design’ are also a great part of what makes a garment ‘meaningful’. And that has led to the current issue you’re going to discover.

Suits — tailoring as a whole — are a form of clothing that has stayed with civilization for many centuries by now. Timelessness is the term usually brought up to describe the allure of this type of garment — that it can stand through the test of time, transcend borders across multiple cultures, and always have a place in a gentleman’s wardrobe.

Well, I couldn’t disagree with that.

From the experience of traveling and living in multiple cities — not many, but several significant capitals — I can guarantee that ‘sartorial garments’ always have a place everywhere (though you might need to learn the social cues and language of each city — which I once articulated about Milan in this editorial).

However, to say that it’s ‘permanent’ in form, that it is always stable in silhouette — is far from the truth. What gentlemen wore sartorially in the 19th century was unlike what appeared in the early 20th century; such as when the coat had been displaced by just an inner coat or the jacket. Or the early 20th century, when the ‘structure’ of a full suit or jacket carried a full drape — compare that to the mid-century, when it had been tapered, with shifts in details such as jacket lapel size and slimmer trousers.

Let alone the 70s, 80s, and 90s (the last decades of tailoring as a norm) — each with a distinct silhouette of its own — due to the emergence of numerous fashion designers who influenced even the so-called ‘permanent style’ that men had held onto for centuries.

So what I would like to convey is that ‘classic menswear’, in the format of tailoring garments, has always been changing — since its emergence as attire for the modern world during the 19th century, to its peak during the 20th, and… unfortunately, its decadence in the 21st — in which it remains a niche for a very small portion of discerning few.

The big question is:

“Why has ‘tailoring’ mattered less and less in the new millennium?”

Certainly, there is the natural human inclination toward casualness — in which, when there is no rule or societal norm expecting one to wear tailoring anymore, there is no reason to carry more burden on the body than necessary. Or the rise of mainstream styles such as streetwear, the minimal ‘Silicon Valley’ style as the new status symbol, or athleisure — influences that now dominate the real scene in mainstream media.

But if ‘clothes’ are a medium of non-verbal communication in their own right — always reflecting the identity, virtue, and beliefs of the individual — then what are those ‘qualities’ that modern mainstream styles actually contain? And what has ‘tailoring’ failed to achieve in comparison?

That — is what we’re going to investigate.