Ben Platt presented a startling image on the cover of a recent issue of Washington’s Capitol File magazine. It wasn’t the fact that the singer-actor was standing at a gravity-defying acute angle to the ground. No, what was attention-grabbing were his pants: They weren’t tight.
We have been suffering through an era of tight pants and skinny suits. For a decade, men have been expected to dress as if it were 1967 and they were Sammy Davis Jr.
It’s a look that favors the young and slender. With the “modern” cut, most middle-aged men find themselves stuffed into stingy trousers suited exclusively for adolescents and marathon runners. Neither flattering nor comfortable, I didn’t think the hyperfitted fashion would find many adherents. I was convinced the skinny trend would run its course quickly. Not so. Fashion designer Thom Browne was making men wear suits too small for them in the aught years. And here we are now, more than 10 years later, and men still think they’re not allowed to both wear a suit and breathe.
But not for much longer, I suspect.
Platt’s Capitol File cover costume is a leading indicator. The clothes were made by a designer named Dries Van Noten. I went to his website and found pictures from a recent runway show with the usual goofy extravagances that will never be worn — in this case, variations on what look like tie-dyed kimonos for men. But amid the wacky patterns, there are clothes in somber charcoal that for all their monochromatic severity are more radical and extravagant than the silly stuff: loose-cut jackets with pleated pants — pleats! — worthy of a zoot suit.
It looked new and different. It looked comfortable.
I mentioned to a friend my belief (and relief) that soon the tyranny of tight pants might be overthrown in favor of a more forgiving style regime. He was doubtful. “I was just at JoS. A Bank, and everything was skinny,” he said. But I take that as a positive sign. There is an iron rule of fashion: Once a style has been adopted by JoS. A Bank, it has run its course.
Loose and tight; tight and loose. These are the basic changes in men’s fashion. Wartime austerity in the ‘40s meant trim suits that didn’t waste fabric; the ‘50s response was to lean toward the billowy; the ‘60s went the other way, first with the boxy Ivy-League cut and then with skinny suits and ties. The suits of the ‘70s were incoherent abominations: jackets with fat lapels paired with pants tight in the loins that gave way to bell bottoms. The ‘80s went for wide shoulders and a generous drape combined with generous pleats. The look lasted through the ‘90s, if reformed. And then the millennium hit and with it came a reaction to roominess as violent as the punk reaction was to disco.
Let’s hope we can avoid a pendulum swing that would take us into the sort of radical bagginess proposed by Dries Van Noten. It could happen, the pendulum having been stuck at the opposite end for so long.
How about, instead, a happy, perhaps even elegant, medium? It’s time for suits that are wearable, that don’t rely on stretch fabrics to allow motion. But roominess doesn’t mean going all MC Hammer. You want a suit you can breathe in, not one you can swim in. And that means a suit that is tailored, and I don’t mean by the nice lady at the dry cleaners. To get a fit that fits, one needs a proper tailor, someone who knows how to make you look good by nipping and tucking where nipping and tucking is warranted and leaving room where it is needed.
If the suit is to survive, it can’t continue to be a constrictive sausage-casing of a costume. Ben Platt shows that super-skinny get-ups are no longer obligatory. It’s time to wear suits that fit.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
