How the suit got its groove back

This article first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar Singapore, the leading fashion glossy on the best of style, beauty, design, travel and the arts. Go to harpersbazaar.com.sg and follow @harpersbazaarsg on Instagram; harpersbazaarsingapore on Facebook. The December 2022 issue is out on newsstands now.

SINGAPORE – The death knell for the suit has been rung more times than can be counted.

The most recent prediction of its demise happened in the throes of lockdown.

The thinking went that once people got used to the comfort of athleisure, loungewear and other work-from-home attire, the suit – with all its connotations of propriety and old-fashioned formality – would be done for.

How wrong they were.

As people emerge from a two-year dry social spell and their calendars fill up again with places to go and parties to throw, designers seem keyed into a collective feeling that people want glamour. They want to dress up and to look sexy.

What people do not want – against the backdrop of everything that is going on in the world – is frivolity, disposability; the sartorial equivalent of empty calories.

Enter, once again, the suit. Only this time, it is not quite the same old thing people have always known.

All those things that have caused the suit’s popularity to dip in recent years – the stuffiness, the dreariness – have been thrown out the window.

The season’s most alluring propositions have a sumptuousness which comes not from fabrication or decoration, but from the way the fabric itself is manipulated.

The focus is on silhouette which, while not reinvented exactly, has certainly been refreshed. The most commanding silhouette feels almost regal – a sense of cloth being sculpted.

Rigour, and then release – strong, wide shoulders that taper into cinched waists and then flow back out into wide, pooling trousers. The effect is one of strength and sensuality, severity and softness, all at once.

Dries Van Noten presented a treatise on glamour with a collection filled with slink, shine and shaggy textures. But one of his most compelling looks was a white suit sans shirt – the jacket fitted, the trousers cut high on the waist with extravagant volume below.

At Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons redefined the male working uniform. Their powerful take on tailoring was centred on the exaggeration of classical proportions – shoulders built far out and waists taken way in.

At Dior Men, Kim Jones pivoted from his usual streetwear-formalwear hybrids and artist collaborations for a solo collection that zoomed in on full-on elegance. His starting point was Christian Dior’s iconic, voluptuous Bar jacket and how it can work in the context of a modern, masculine wardrobe.

Like the works of his fellow designers reshaping the suit, Jones’ collection was a masterclass in how, with the right touch, everything old can be new again.