Is this the death of the work suit?

Once a rite of passage, Mick Brown asks if Covid has condemned formalwear to become moth fodder for good

The celebrated American writer Gay Talese lives in a handsome brownstone on New York’s Upper East Side. Each morning, Talese, a fastidious dresser, climbs the stairs to his dressing room on the top floor of the house where he dresses for work: a threepiece suit, handmade in Paris by his Italian cousins (Talese comes from a family of tailors); a crisp, striped shirt with a contrasting white collar, handmade by Addison On Madison; a silk tie; pocket handkerchief, correspondent shoes.

Thus attired, he will make the journey down four flights of stairs, out of the front door, down the steps to the pavement, and down a further flight of steps… to his basement office, where he will spend the day writing.

At weekends, Talese might kick back and relax, forsaking the suit for a sports jacket and slacks – always, of course, with a shirt and tie.

I’ve thought of Talese from time to time over the past year, wondering if, in the sartorially lax spirit of the times, he might have let standards slip – while knowing full well that he wouldn’t. It is impossible to imagine Talese in a hoodie and tracksuit trousers, or doing a Zoom call in an open-necked shirt and pyjama bottoms.

Talese is a man for whom standards matter. But he may be of a dying breed. The last 12 months have not been a good time for the suit. Hanging in closets, a feast for moths, glimpsed only rarely on BBC newsreaders and at Covid briefing sessions, it is in danger of becoming the garment time forgot.

Even before Covid, the suit appeared to be going out of fashion, and sales were in decline. Over the past few years, major banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have relaxed their policy on employees wearing suits, in line with the casually dressed tech giants (and potentially rival employers) such as Facebook and Google. In 2019, the market research group Kantar was reporting that more than £110 million had been wiped off annual suit sales in just four years.

But the pandemic has inflicted what appears to be a mortal wound. In the first two months of lockdown last year, M&S, Britain’s biggest retailer of suits, sold just 7,500 suits – 80 per cent down on the equivalent period in 2019; while between July and September last year sales of formal wear, including suits, were down 16 per cent online and 54 per cent in store.

A BBC survey this week revealed that almost all 50 of the UK’S biggest companies have said they do not plan to bring staff back to the office full-time, allowing people to follow the “hybrid” model of working from home two or three days a week – and meaning no full-time return to the workplace for more than a million people.

People have grown accustomed to slouching around in casualwear – bingeing, like comfort food and Netflix, on tracksuit trousers and trainers. What hope for the suit now?

Buying a suit was once a rite of passage, an initiation into manhood (“You’ll be needing one of these, son…”), a necessary item for doing grown-up things – weddings, funerals, first job interview, a court appearance. And not just for the office or special occasions. The suit was for “going out” – wherever “out” happened to be. Look at photographs of dance halls as late as the 1970s and everybody is suited and booted.

Mods, in particular – those paragons of teenage style – swore by the suit, usually mohair. Writing in the Sixties, Nik Cohn, an early and astute observer of British youth culture and style, recounted the story of one mod, Thomas Baines, whose dedication to sartorial exactitude was such that A cut above: Jon Hamm as Don Draper in Mad Men; iconic suit-wearer Frank Sinatra; and the ever dapper Duke of Edinburgh

he “refused to have sex at parties unless there was a shoe tree available and a press for his trousers”. There is something heroic about that.

The suit is the only garment that breeds this sort of fastidiousness. When Tom Ford made his film

A Single Man, based on Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 book about a university professor named George, Ford dressed his leading man Colin Firth in an immaculate bespoke suit, with the added conceit of aping the Savile Row custom of sewing in a label with the customer’s name and date of delivery: “George Falconer: August, 1957”. Nobody watching the film would see it, of course – but that wasn’t the point. As Ford explained: “I think you feel it.”

But somewhere along the way, the suit fell out of favour. Instead of smartness and style, it became the symbol of staidness and convention. To call someone “a suit” became an insult, suggesting a corporate apparatchik or bureaucrat, a slave to the machine.

Even more outré, and inseparable from the suit, was the tie. It seems incredible to think there were once concessions at mainline railway stations, Tie Rack, to catch the eye of commuters on the way home from the office. The idea now sounds as archaic as a concession selling top hats.

But something has been lost in this, of course: style. One thinks of quintessential wearers of the suit. JFK; David Hockney – in a singular, rumpled way; the Duke of Edinburgh; Cary Grant (whose lightweight, single-breasted grey flannel Kilgour suit worn in North by Northwest is regularly cited as the greatest suit in film history).

Then there is Frank Sinatra, of course, who embodied the maxim that a good suit doesn’t shout, it sings. Tasteful, if not always restrained; beautifully made, effortlessly worn. Sinatra once laid down a list of rules for suit-wearers to follow: no brown, white, grey or blue after the sun goes down, unless it’s midnight blue. Wear conservative silk ties, and a pocket square that is perfectly folded. Don’t wear a tuxedo on Sunday. (Who would even dream of it?)

Sinatra favoured loose-fitting, single-breasted suits, often with a snap-brim hat worn at a cocky angle. Another iconic suit wearer, Leonard

Cohen, favoured double-breasted with wide lapels, often in a broad pinstripe. Cohen, who was born into a wealthy family of clothing manufacturers in Montreal, explained that he had grown up in a period “before blue jeans hit”, and always felt more comfortable in a suit.

“So you put on a jacket even if you’re not going out?” an interviewer once asked him.

“Especially if I’m not going out.” An ordained Buddhist monk, Cohen sometimes wore Armani suits while he meditated, imbuing his appearance, as the writer Nathalie Atkinson observed, with such monastic intention the jacket and trousers “may as well have been liturgical vestments”.

A fitting analogy. Enter any tailoring establishment on Savile Row and you will be struck by the fact that it is less a shop than a church – the air of hushed reverence that envelopes you as you step through the door, the ritual of greeting, choosing the cloth, measuring, fitting, the final act of communion with the suit itself.

The last 12 months have affected Savile Row particularly badly. Customers were unable to visit, and it’s impossible to measure up on Zoom. In the case of some establishments, more than 60 per cent of business comes from abroad; travel bans killed that stone-dead. If ever the death knell of the suit were to be sounded, one thinks, it would be here.

But, surprisingly, the opposite appears to be the case. Colin Heywood, the managing director of Anderson and Sheppard – tailors to the Prince of Wales and, in an earlier age, Fred Astaire and Cole Porter – told me that people being stranded at home has given a surprising impetus to the suit: “After a year of dressing casually, people are looking forward to dressing up again.”

Heywood, immaculate in a dark blue pinhead worsted, turned the pages of an order book, as venerablelooking as the Book of Kells, pointing out the number of new orders that had come in just in the four weeks since non-essential shops had been allowed to open. And not just from established customers. A younger generation, who have spent lockdown poring over photos on Instagram and saving money by not eating out or going on holidays, are now in the position, as Heywood puts it, of experiencing “the real sense of joy putting on a well-made suit”.

And this is the thing. A good suit is not just for the special occasion, it is special in itself. But for some, it seems, no longer special enough. M&S say that half of their customers have said they intend to dress more casually in the office than before Covid-19, prompting the firm to introduce a new range of what it calls “smart separates” across formalwear that can suit a variety of occasions – such as tailored bomber jackets and trousers with “drawcord waistbands”. Bomber jackets! Drawcord waistbands!

For God’s sake, don’t tell Gay Talese.

Sinatra embodied the maxim that a good two-piece doesn’t shout, it sings