A suit still cuts it, but it’s all about comfort now
There is something deeply satisfying about wearing an outfit made up of two matching pieces. Stepping into a bottom half and then a top half that share colour and fabric, or slipping a matching coat over a dress, has a soothing, ritualistic simplicity. Like completing a Rubik’s Cube, but a lot easier. Repetition is always comforting, after all. A bowl of pasta, every forkful the same as the last, is calming and consoling after a long day; an episode of Friends that you have seen 20 times before offers a very particular kind of dopamine hit.
This is why pyjamas match. It is why, in the uncharted and psychologically choppy waters of the first lockdown, people who did not think they were tracksuit people at all started merrily clicking add-to-basket on coloured joggers with matching hoodies. Those days are gone, thank goodness, but the tracksuit has left a fashion legacy way beyond a reliance on elasticated waists. It has given us a taste for matchymatchy as a pleasurable way to dress.
For decades the tailored suit symbolised the tyranny of office hours, the faceless crush of the commute. A tailored suit was a look to take note of, pay respect to, but it was not really a look to love. In the era of hybrid working, the balance of power has shifted: the clock-in-clock-out regime of office life has loosened its iron grip on many – and changed how we feel about wearing suits.
This summer, off-duty suits in party colours were a go-to look for wedding guests. Extra-chilled versions of the suit became de rigueur at the most informal of settings. At festivals, a vibrant print short-sleeve shirt and matching shorts was the menswear look of choice for youthful peacocks; even at the beach, the beach pyjama (drawstring shorts plus a shirt worn open) was the chicest bikini cover-up of the summer. Matchy-matchy doesn’t mean uptight any more. It’s not about lining up your pinstripes or neurotically coordinating your court shoes with your clutch bag; it means pyjamas and tracksuits and not having to think too hard.
The linen suit is about as chilled as a suit can get. Brad Pitt spent summer riding the European heatwave on the press tour for Bullet Train dressed in a series of juicy coloured linen suits. Pitt is always enjoyable to look at, but there was something particularly cheering about him in lightly crumpled pastel linen, looking as if he might be about to slope off the red carpet and sit outside a bar with a beer. Perhaps for a game of cards or a cheeky cigarette.
Pitt’s only real rival for summer style icon – the coastal grandmother, fashion’s current imaginary main character, best embodied by Diane Keaton in Nancy Meyers’ Something’s Gotta Give – might also be found in a linen suit. This version would be the colour of very good chardonnay. The trousers would be rolled – for walking on the beach, which a coastal grandmother does a lot – and the jacket as soft as a buttondown shirt. There might be a straw hat.
The genius of a slouchy suit is that you don’t need pinstripes, shoulder pads, a tie or starched shirt to make it look like … well, a look. A matching twopiece looks dapper, whether it is Savile Row or a fresh Nike tracksuit. (This, after all, is why the tracksuit has such status in streetwear: a suit is always power dressing, with pinstripes or a swoosh.) Comfort dressing is the new power dressing. Double the impact, half the effort. Suits me.
At festivals, a vibrant short-sleeve shirt and matching shorts was the menswear look of choice for youthful peacocks