Some thought the Covid-19 pandemic would be the final nail in the coffin for the men's suit.
And then a weird thing happened. Led by a new generation of designers and makers who are tinkering with the traditional formulas to invent (or revive) strange and exciting ways of dressing up, tailoring started coming back stronger than ever.
The barometric designer Virgil Abloh was likely sensing this shift when he donned an epic suit—a belted blazer over voluminous trousers—in Paris on the day of his Louis Vuitton show earlier this summer. All around, stylish 20-something Parisians increasingly resemble French New Wave leading men, thanks to the influence of cult-favorite tailoring brand Husbands. In Atlanta, a new label called Factor's has been flooded with appointments for its funky $3,000 unisex suiting. And in New York, where West Village tailor J. Mueser's crew of young dandies reside, I've never seen more blazers and ties at downtown bars.
Speaking of ties, Abloh's comes emblazoned with the phrase “A FORMALITY.” Classic Abloh-ian irony—the new era of tailoring is anything but.
Ziggy Chen
Ziggy Chen came to fashion design late in life. A decade ago, shortly after turning 40, the former university professor of textile design began experimenting with soft tailoring that combines the loose, straight lines of 1920s Chinese Changshan robes with the construction of 19th-century European jackets. Now, Chen's growing line of artisanal menswear represents one of the most exciting collections coming out of China.
Chen's namesake label is a conceptual ready-to-wear brand, not a tailoring house. Whereas tailors deliver suits that are crisp and unworn, Ziggy Chen suits look like they've been softened, crinkled, and stained by years of wear. Chen's customers flock to the brand's Shanghai store precisely because they don't want to look pristine—they want to envelop themselves within his singular vision.
Chen approaches his collections as part historian, part poet, and he counts traditional Chinese art and architecture as major sources of inspiration. “The influence is deeply ingrained instead of acquired through learning,” he explains. “Perhaps it was simply the sunlight shining on a moss-covered wall that inspired my design for a piece of fabric.”
Chen is also hyper-focused on the feeling his garments convey to the wearer. His clothes are designed to conceal the shape of the body—jackets and coats are cut straight and loose, with soft, slender silhouettes that, as Chen says, “endow liberty to the wearer.” The only point of emphasis in Chen's jackets is where they trace the shoulder. “A natural shoulder line does not look aggressive,” he says, “and clothes without shoulder padding could reveal the wearer's natural unadorned shoulder line, exuding the wearer's inner strength.”
Western suits are designed to project power; Chen's deliver a more subtle statement, one of quiet, thoughtful confidence. He plans to continue spreading his message on the international fashion stage. “As designers from different cultures,” Chen says, “we need to think from the perspective of our own cultural background in this internet era.”
Kenneth Ize
Designer Kenneth Ize launched his collection in 2017 with the proceeds from a successful GoFundMe campaign. Soon after, his multicolored jackets and trousers, tailored out of aso oke fabric, a traditional Nigerian textile, started winning him international accolades. Only three years after his brand was just a dream, Ize opened a weaving factory in Ilorin, Nigeria.
Because Ize's aso oke is woven the old-school way—by hand—it takes three days to create enough fabric to produce one suit jacket. His slow-fashion approach is one that most brands have modernized their way out of. But aso oke, says the Lagos-born designer, “is what I grew up with and what I know. For me, it's very important.”
During the pandemic, Ize began taking custom-tailoring orders so that his employees could stay busy, and he plans to launch a website where customers can order suits—and, in the future, maybe even trade them with one another once they're ready for a new look. It's a modern vision of commerce fit for a suit liberated from the old rules.
To Ize, tailoring should be inclusive, so he designed the cut of his jackets to fit almost everybody. “For me right now,” he says, “thinking of something fresh is thinking about fluidity. How can something fit perfectly for a guy and fit perfectly for a girl as well? That's what I'm seeing as modern tailoring.”
Doppiaa
When Alain Fracassi and Albert Carreras embarked on a clothing brand together, the longtime friends decided, first of all, to dress their dads. It was no easy task to impress them: Albert's father is the nattily dressed Spanish tenor José Carreras, and Fracassi's father, Adriano, who ran a boutique in northern Italy, is a street style legend.
To satisfy their O.G.s, Doppiaa, which they launched in 2015, embraces certain classic Italian sartorial principles. Their clothes are refined and have a proper sense of proportion. They are made out of some of the finest fabrics available. And perhaps most important, 100 percent of the manufacturing happens in Italy—no easy task in today's globalized world.
Beyond that, Fracassi and Carreras don't look back much at their parents' generation. In fact, Doppiaa (which, in a nod to the founders' first names, means “double a” in Italian) might be the only Milanese menswear brand that isn't above styling plaid double-breasted blazers with hoodies. Those blazers are designed to fit seamlessly within a modern lifestyle: Soft and unlined, a Doppiaa jacket—available off-the-rack at the likes of SSENSE—moves with the wearer and won't complain if you have to throw it in a tote bag.
“We do mono-breast suits, of course, but the double-breasted is our favorite one,” says Carreras. “It's a little bit more sporty, more relaxed. It's not so square.” The idea is to allow the wearer the ultimate freedom to style their suit however they like, a simple idea with almost universal appeal: The brand's customers range in age from 20-somethings to septuagenarians. (Their parents, it turns out, approve.) “The same suit, you can wear it in different scenarios depending on how you combine it,” Carreras says. “You can wear it with a polo, you can wear it with knitwear or with a shirt, or even”—gasp!—“with a tie.”
J. Mueser
On a recent visit to the headquarters of tailoring brand J. Mueser, I found something I wasn't expecting: a watermelon-flavored sartorial explosion. There, I was greeted by 26-year-old Mueser employee Chase Winfrey, who was wearing a bright green silk matka blazer and electric pink linen trousers. He looked garish, like a Masters winner who'd rummaged through a rich grandmother's boudoir.
I loved it. Winfrey's ensemble reminded me of the opulence and fluidity of a Gucci collection. Though the drape of his jacket and cut of his trousers screamed tradition, the overall look broadcast a radical attitude that felt brand-new. And Mueser's work has taken off with a generation fluent in hard-core personal style, as evidenced by Winfrey and his friends, who can often be spotted chasing the night in dinner jackets and cowboy boots, treating New York's dive bars like Studio 54.
Jake Mueser founded his brand in 2008 and has since established what might be the closest thing NYC has to a signature style of tailoring. His suits are a “melting pot,” as he calls it, of influences: There's the American natural shoulder, the English ticket pocket, the generous Italian lapel. Custom suits start at $2,450 and take five weeks to make in a small workshop in Naples. “We're, I think, exceptionally good at the nerdier side of tailoring,” says Mueser.
But for all of his adherence to tradition, what keeps his customers coming back is his ability to break his own rules. When the artist Walton Ford requested suits that he could wear while biking around and painting, Mueser made him several out of a heavy-duty cotton drill and gave them double-stitched seams for extra durability. “I try to encourage people to stay within our style, but we have a lot of flexibility,” says Mueser. “It's not really bespoke if you're only doing it off their body measurements. It should be tailored to them as a person.”
Factor's
Matt Lambert spent 12 years helping build Sid Mashburn's menswear empire, which means he practically has a Ph.D. in classic American tailoring. But last year, when he started designing the suit that would become the core of his new label, Factor's, he decided to blow up the curriculum. “Neil Young and Kurt Cobain are my style icons,” he says. “They may not have worn suits, but in my mind I'm designing a suit that they would want to wear.”
So Lambert took the handmade suits he knew from his previous job and knocked out the stuffiness, designing the Factor's model to be reminiscent of a louche '70s Saint Laurent silhouette, with structured shoulders, an elongated body, and flowy straight-leg trousers.
Every Factor's suit starts with an appointment—often scheduled via DM or text—at Lambert's office in the Atlanta neighborhood of Little Five Points. He offers dozens of fabrics, but none are patterned. “Texture and wearability,” Lambert says, “drive everything we do. The texture is our pattern.” Suits start at $3,000 and take about 12 weeks to make in American tailoring workshops, and while they wait, clients can stock up on Factor's pieces that Cobain surely would have approved of, like vintage mesh military shirts and punkish George Cox Popboy derbies. (Lambert isn't planning on making ties anytime soon.) Velvet is on the menu for upcoming drops, and when we spoke he hinted at just how far-out he's willing to get. “Right now,” he told me, “I'm excited about leather shorts.”
Husbands
At a time when Mick Jagger's fluid, feline style is exerting a renewed influence throughout men's fashion, Parisian menswear brand Husbands offers an intriguing proposition: What if you just dressed like Mick Jagger?
While working as a lawyer in Paris, Nicolas Gabard asked himself this question and found that there weren't any non-fashion brands making clothes that channeled the suave indifference and thrumming sexiness of his idols Jagger, Bowie, and Gainsbourg. So Gabard, who has said he's in the business of style, not fashion, quit his job and founded Husbands (a name borrowed from the John Cassavetes film) in 2012.
The Husbands suit features a sharp Roman shoulder, an elegantly curved lapel, and extremely high-waisted trousers, which, in the house style, lithely taper into a pair of sleek Cuban-heel boots. “Husbands,” a representative for the brand told me, “is constantly developing clothes that are outrageously classic but also indefinably stylish and cool. Like Paris was in the '70s, when sexy tailoring ruled the world.”
Customers can get their own sexy tailoring at the brand's chic storefront near the Palais-Royal, where off-the-rack suits start at $1,600 and custom suits, which take six to eight weeks to produce, start at $1,800. (The suits are all made by a third-generation family operation in Naples, and most of the fabrics hail from England.) The store is a one-stop shop for aspiring rock stars: Skinny patent leather belts, wide-collared western shirts, and swooping flared trousers complement the suit's attitude.
On a recent visit, I tried on a beefy green corduroy blazer that looked straight out of Antonioni's Blow-Up and a fatigues-colored overshirt developed to resemble an exquisite vintage find. An employee encouraged me to try the shirt with a tie, noting that Husbands “likes to show that you can have fun with boring things.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2021 issue with the title "Where in the World Is Your Suit From?."
