The Suit: Form, Function and Style

by Christopher Breward

Overview

A beautifully tailored history of this fashion staple—at once a garment of tradition, power, and subversion.
 
The Suit unpicks the story of this most familiar garment, from its emergence in western Europe at the end of the seventeenth century to today. Suit-wearing figures such as the Savile Row gentleman and the Wall Street businessman have long embodied ideas of tradition, masculinity, power, and respectability, but the suit has also been used to disrupt concepts of gender and conformity. Adopted and subverted by women, artists, musicians, and social revolutionaries through the decades—from dandies and Sapeurs to the Zoot Suit and Le Smoking—the suit is also a device for challenging the status quo. For all those interested in the history of menswear, this beautifully illustrated book offers new perspectives on this most mundane, and poetic, product of modern culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780235585
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	04/15/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	28 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Christopher Breward is the director of National Museums Scotland. He is the author of The Hidden Consumer, Fashion, and Fashioning London.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Tailor’s Art
1. Well Suited
2. Suiting Nations
3. Sharp Suits
4. Seeing the Suit
5. Epilogue: Future Suits

References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

What People are Saying About This

Ed Burstell

“Spirited and well researched, The Suit: Form, Function and Style is a thoroughly informed examination of the ubiquitous garment that is a staple in every man’s life. Combining both substance and style, it provides a journey into the evolution of the suit and its cultural influence through the ages.”

G. Bruce Boyer

“In its long history the suit has been both a symbol of adherence to mainstream authority as well as a weapon of rebellion. In this book, Breward masterfully traces the suit’s influence in modern and contemporary cultures with thorough scholarship and vivid writing. The Suit is a magical tour of the corporeal terrain of the garment that continues to intrigue us as it reflects the ever-changing economic and cultural contexts in which it is found. A triumph of scholarship and a joy to read.”

Editorial Reviews

[Breward] is knowledgeable about his subject, insightful in his analysis, and imaginative in the connections that he makes. The result is a thoughtful and at times lively riffle through the male wardrobe from Restoration England onward.

Literary Review

Breward climbs into every armhole and measures every inside leg. He stops at nothing to decode the enigmas of men’s tailoring.

Simon Doonan

Breward’s intelligent consideration of the suit is an antidote to all the bombastic ‘how to’ guides written by fashion journalists and bloggers whose idea of cultural context is to speed read a Wikipedia page. . . . a rich, deep, and satisfying study.

World of Interiors

Breward’s book on the history and culture of the gentleman’s suit is a handsome, hardback volume with a generous number of large-format illustrations. . . . His is not a straightforward, object-oriented interpretation; what makes the book such a clever and rewarding read lies in how Breward assumes the position of a tailor in tackling a cultural history of the suit, as if fashioning a garment in material form. This is a book crafted by the measuring, marking, aligning, fitting and shaping of evidence. Just as the seam allowances of a bespoke suit allow its proportions to be altered to fit a body modified by the regimes and excesses of life, so Breward appreciates that cultural and material histories are also malleable, with margins that can be redrawn and reassembled.

Journal of Design History

The Suit has its own spare, modernist elegance. It presents a decisively uncluttered history of menswear, cutting a clean line through eighteenth-century French military uniforms to dandies, Pasolini films and twentieth-century Italian tailoring, all the while insisting on the suit’s ‘all-pervasive influence in modern and contemporary cultures.'

Financial Times

Metropolis Summer Reading List 2016. . . . A scholarly history of sartorial style, a dialectic between peacock fashions and their renunciation.”
 

Metropolis

Breward offers a compendious account of the evolution of the suit from the gaudily decorated outfits of the Elizabethen court, through the luxury textile trade, to the genesis of something like the modern idea of well-dressed manhood (essentially, expensive understatement) in the nineteenth-century Parisian cult of the dandy. . . . When Breward ventures beyond just telling his story to speculate a little on the cultural resonances behind it, he does so with a sharp, laconic intelligence.

Times Literary Supplement

Expertly shows how the adoption of the suit was a manifestation of societal change as the great European wars of the 17th and 18th centuries morphed into the Industrial Revolution and thereon into the modern democratic world. Indeed, it would be hard to name another facet of our modern culture that has so effortlessly and variously expressed the cross-purposes of, say, Baudelaire, Le Corbusier, and Mao Zedong. The suit is the perfect signifier, and as Mr. Breward shows, it carries all the noble, artistic, economic, and perverse impulses of our culture.

Wall Street Journal

An attractively illustrated history unpicking the story of the gentleman’s tailored suit from its emergence in Western Europe at the end of the 17th century to its fate in the 21st century.

Bookseller

“The Suit has its own spare, modernist elegance. It presents a decisively uncluttered history of menswear, cutting a clean line through eighteenth-century French military uniforms to dandies, Pasolini films and twentieth-century Italian tailoring, all the while insisting on the suit’s ‘all-pervasive influence in modern and contemporary cultures.'

Financial Times

“Expertly shows how the adoption of the suit was a manifestation of societal change as the great European wars of the 17th and 18th centuries morphed into the Industrial Revolution and thereon into the modern democratic world. Indeed, it would be hard to name another facet of our modern culture that has so effortlessly and variously expressed the cross-purposes of, say, Baudelaire, Le Corbusier, and Mao Zedong. The suit is the perfect signifier, and as Mr. Breward shows, it carries all the noble, artistic, economic, and perverse impulses of our culture.

Wall Street Journal

“In its long history the suit has been both a symbol of adherence to mainstream authority as well as a weapon of rebellion. In this book, Breward masterfully traces the suit’s influence in modern and contemporary cultures with thorough scholarship and vivid writing. The Suit is a magical tour of the corporeal terrain of the garment that continues to intrigue us as it reflects the ever-changing economic and cultural contexts in which it is found. A triumph of scholarship and a joy to read.

G. Bruce Boyer

“Spirited and well researched, The Suit: Form, Function and Style is a thoroughly informed examination of the ubiquitous garment that is a staple in every man’s life. Combining both substance and style, it provides a journey into the evolution of the suit and its cultural influence through the ages.

Ed Burstell

04/15/2016
Breward (cultural history, Univ. of Edinburgh; The Hidden Consumer) offers a brief but comprehensive outline of the suit's evolution from its aesthetic conception to becoming a powerful icon of modern refinement. Donning the social, economic, and political symbols associated with the sourcing, creating, and promoting of garments, the suit has shed layers of physical reinforcement through the ages. This book details the product's acclimation to the changing world of fashion in which construction is the union of aspiration and trust between tailor and client, mechanization allows for the collapse of hierarchy, and the working class redefines values of appearance and possibilities. Much of the text is dedicated to the suit's adoption by particular political groups, social movements, and forms of labor. Breward touches on the avant-garde idea of deconstructing the components of clothing in search of an article's modern identity and spurs the question of what's next in the suit's journey. A section on contemporary variations of the suit and technological innovations in the fabric industry could have anchored the present-day relevancy of this book. VERDICT This title reaffirms the suit's enduring features, though it may be too padded with cultural history to provide much more than that. Useful for potential menswear designers but not a necessary purchase for industry professionals.—Zeying Wang, School Library Journal (ZW)

Library Journal