Is this the end of the suit?

With our work and social lives now drastically altered, tailors and menswear retailers are cutting their cloth to suit the times.

To remain relevant, suit stores need to adapt to the new, relaxed landscape, says Harrolds Menswear manager Alireza Shakoori.

“Hi Ben. It’s been a while since you visited our showroom. I just wanted to touch base to check how you are going with your garments and if you needed anything altered...”

Among the various messages of support and general checking-in received as the first wave of COVID-19 swept across Australia, it was a text from the tailor that was most eye-opening. Working from home was in full swing, and as colleagues and friends shared their newfound fondness for teaming tracksuit pants with shirts and ties, the idea of wearing a suit again suddenly felt strange. For starters, where would I wear it? 

Weddings have been postponed, or at least greatly restricted, and annual big events such as racing’s Spring Carnival looking uncertain. Birthdays are being done via Zoom, and most workplaces are maintaining either work-from-home or scheduled rosters to minimise interaction. Basically, any scenario for which you can imagine yourself dusting off your favourite navy merino number won’t be happening anytime soon. But even when things eventually improve, either via a vaccine or drastic “flattening of the curve”, our relationship with suits may never recover.

Ever since Beau Brummell shook British sensibilities with his military-inspired take on men’s fashion back in the 19th century, suits have enjoyed a long and illustrious career as the cornerstone of sophisticated menswear. Their stable, forthright approach to style has allowed them to become one of the most versatile items in a man’s wardrobe. It was what you pulled out of your wardrobe when you wanted to “dress for the job you want”. But to all things their season and today the suit is struggling to maintain its foothold in a world where its reliability is now seen as restrictive. 

Tailor Patrick Johnson

This time last year, Sydney-based tailor Patrick Johnson was fulfilling a full book of custom orders for weddings and bespoke suits for the annual peacocking of Spring Carnival. While his P Johnson showrooms around the world remain in various states of operation, in Sydney the kind of requests coming from clients are already showing a drastic move away from formal modes of dress. “I would have said before COVID that casualwear was approximately 30 per cent of our business,” says Johnson. “So that’s clothes that aren’t a type of suiting or formal shirting. Now, during COVID, this category has been about 45 per cent of our work. We’ve really seen a definite increase in that category.”

However he says these changes were already in the pipeline as far as menswear, especially in Australia, is concerned.

“What COVID has really done is speed up what was already going to happen over the next year or two in tailoring. We were already pushing in that direction – we’re a specialist lightweight casual tailor so we were always on the more casual side of style.”

Johnson says while suits will always be a part of the business, the most important trend to follow is the needs of the client. “Our whole purpose is to create complete wardrobes for our clients; our designs always ebb and flow with what our clients need,” he tells WISH. “Our biggest conversations with our clients at the moment are ‘how can we help you out now?’. I was recently chatting to one, who is a lawyer, and he was saying it’s very rare now that he would wear a suit and tie to work. He pretty much only wears one when he has to go to court. But pre-COVID he would have worn suits at least four days a week, regardless.”

M.J. Bale founder Matt Jensen says he’s seen similar shifts in customers’ buying habits as comfort becomes the focus of a populace forced to stay at home. “[This time last year], suits and more formal jackets for the office, I would say, made up about 60 per cent of our sales,” he says. “I think that number now is somewhere between 45 and 50 per cent. Now, with many people doing a split week of three days in the office and two days at home working remotely, they don’t need to have that same type of product.”

But Jensen has also been preparing for just this moment. For the past two years, M.J. Bale has steadily increased its casual offering alongside its regular suiting. This, says Jensen, has been driven purely by observation of the Australian market. “As clothing makers, we need to stay relevant to what people are doing and how they’re living their lives, and what proportion of their time they’re spending at different locations. Do they still need a two-piece suit to work from home? No, not really. But they still need great clothes.

“The knit is the new shirt – what I’m seeing is that knitwear is now the key driver of the style worn back with tailored pieces, like jackets, and sportswear. It’s a lot more fluid – the whole environment is a lot more fluid. The tie is really gone, by the way; we used to sell a lot of ties and now that market is occasional dress only, which is unfortunate. But people’s lifestyles are driving that, and also comfort. The need for comfort is there more than ever and people want to feel good in what they’re wearing.”

Workplaces that had already started to shed suits as the benchmark of business attire are adopting rapid changes to their policies on appropriate workplace dress, with “business casual” now creeping into the corporate lexicon. Vicki Jamieson, people advisory services director at the Sydney arm of Ernst & Young, tells WISH that, while the company has had a “dress for the day” policy for several years, the impact of coronavirus and the merging of the private and professional in work-from-home scenarios has thrown traditional policies out the window. “There will potentially be areas of the business that never wear a suit again,” Jamieson says.

“COVID, and the prolonged work-from-home conditions, have resulted in a significant blurring between our work and home lives. Our ways of working, habits and behaviours have shifted to accommodate the duality of working where we live and living where we work. Dial into any of our meetings and it’s tiles of faces in hoodies, sweats and comfort wear. I don’t expect that this degree of casual attire will continue when we return to the office, but I think the blurring of business and casualwear will continue.”

Jamieson admits, however, that this progressive relaxing of what staff are required to wear to the office was already well under way at Ernst & Young, and in its nascent stages at similar companies such as Aon and KPMG. COVID-19 has simply sped up the timeline.

“Coronavirus has accelerated the future of work,” says Jamieson. “It has put into fast-forward pre-existing trends, moving us rapidly into a future we were already on the path to realising. A fundamental shift will be the role of the office post-COVID and the expectation that few, if any of us, will completely return to a nine-to-five, office-bound working arrangement. Where work is done will impact how work is done, and what is worn when we are in work mode. As a Big Four consulting firm, I don’t think we are saying goodbye to suits. But they will be worn by choice rather than being driven by the need to conform.”

Matt Jensen, founder of M.J. Bale

None of these changes have come out of the blue. As designers, and the maisons they represent, target an ever-younger audience, streetwear and elevated casuals have dominated their collections, representing a new model of luxury where relaxed styling and utility are key. The rise of athleisurewear has also shown that garments inspired by an active lifestyle can be done in a way that combines elegance with comfort.

Since 2007, when Dior’s then creative director Kris Van Assche sent suits with sneakers down the runway, menswear collections at each of the major fashion weeks have continually pushed towards a more casual, sportier aesthetic. Since then, for fashion’s most stalwart brands, including those specifically known for suits, they have been increasingly absent from runway shows. (However in her 2014 book Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style, fashion historian Deirdre Clemente suggests the real departure began as early as the 1940s, when the youth of America’s elite college campuses started to embrace a look now known as Preppy, built upon mixing khakis and blazers.) 

With Kim Jones replacing Assche as creative director in 2018, Dior has continued to reveal a direction for menswear that combines the brand’s native elegance with an urban edge. Its collections have been an exercise in contrasts, a remix of high and low styling. Jones’s most recent collection, deliberately dishevelled knits were combined with trousers cut with the kind of sharp precision only seen in bespoke tailoring.

Similarly, since Virgil Abloh took the reins at Louis Vuitton, the French maison has taken on a new youthful identity, cross-matching streetwear with formal pieces for a finished product more at home in the bars and clubs of New York or Tokyo than in the corner suites of the Big Four. Armani has adopted a silhouette that looks more like your weekend sweats, with the rigid silhouette of suits swapped for the softer lines of cardigans and voluminous velvet trousers with as much structure as a cumulus cloud. Even the staunchly reliable Hugo Boss has embraced the revolution with streamlined offerings that, while still carrying the brand’s DNA of cool-yet-conservative, are focused on an audience wanting more than something fit for only one occasion.

Under Alessandro Sartori, this idea of breaking the suit down into its parts has become the modus operandi at Ermenegildo Zegna.“Breaking the conventional office uniform, Zegna aims to rediscover and reimagine tailoring: from business suit to lifestyle suit,” Sartori says. The modern man and what he needs from his wardrobe can be summed up in one word: hybrid, he says. “It is all about reshuffling or hybridising categories, breaking boundaries in order to explore new territories: this is our new tailoring lexicon. One experimentation leads to the next, in one seamless dialogue, always keeping in mind that our art should always respect the earth. That’s our mission, as both humans and fashion-makers.”

That’s not to say the finer details of what makes a suit will no longer have a role to play. Tailoring as an art and design practice remains one of the key details that will, in the post-COVID-19 future, be key in crafting the kind of wardrobe that appears professionally nonchalant. And retailers, says Alireza Shakoori, tailoring manager for Harrolds Menswear, will need to adapt to this new, relaxed landscape if they are to remain relevant. “Retail, especially clothing, has to be dynamic,” he says. “If you’re not dynamic, if you’re not agile in terms of responding, it’s not going to last. And I think Harrolds is a good example of this. For 35 years now the business has evolved and grown to be able to address what changes need to be considered.” 

Alizera Shakoori, tailoring manager for Harrolds Menswear

As to what the tailoring experience may look like in future, it’s a question yet to be answered. Online tailors such as InStitchu and Suitsupply have given time-poor men the chance to take a DIY approach to measuring in their own time and homes. These are, for all purposes, fine and well-made suits. But it’s also true that nothing comes close to the final perfection of having your measurements taken professionally.

Johnson admits that unprecedented times do call for a creative approach to the way he plies his trade and he has already made inroads into a digital tailoring service in his own business. But there’s still a level of hands-on interaction that can’t be replicated in an online environment. “Different approaches work with different clients,” he says. “For the more computer- and tech-savvy, online consultations and fittings work well. We have been doing these for a number of years with great results.

“There is very good technology available now to help with this and it has become even easier recently, given our customers are very used to video calls at the moment. However it isn’t for everybody and in some cases our clients prefer a more hands-on approach. Here we take all the necessary precautions and the process is quite simple. It’s horses for courses.”

What will matter most in post-COVID-19 reality is not so much the “what” part of your wardrobe but the “how”: how you will wear each detail and the styling of each outfit. This, says Jensen, is where retailers and craftsmen such as Harrolds, P. Johnson Tailors and M.J. Bale will need to focus their attention in order to keep their businesses on the up.

“If you’re confident and know how to put things together, can go and explore with different looks and different silhouettes, and you’re happy to spend the time looking for them and styling them yourself and curating on a weekly basis to wear them professionally – if you’re good at that, fantastic,” Jensen says. “The best in the world [when it comes to personal styling] are the Italians and the Japanese, and they really understand the idea of pulling together their looks and they spend a lot of time on it. But Australians, I think, are still learning.”

For Johnson, the goal is ultimately to make sure Australian men look their best, whether that’s in a suit or a knit tucked into trousers with a pair of sneakers. “I just want to dress our customers,” he says. “Whatever they need, we’ll do... It doesn’t bother me if that’s a suit or not. I love the suit and I love its format, but I’m not stuck on it. We’re about building wardrobes for our clients.”