Tailor and Tailoring


History
Evolution of Suit │ Development of Tailoring Industry



The Evolution of the Englishman’s Suit

“It is customary to regard the modern style of male costume as originating from the reign of Charles II when the suit composed coat, waistcoat and breeches, garments which necessitated improvements in the tailor’s skill.” - Dr Willett Cunnington

Charles I went to the scaffold on 30th January 1649, wearing a doublet and hose. These he had worn all his life. In 1649, Charles II wore tailored coat, vest and breeches that together will come to make an Englishman’s suit. In 1666, after Charles II died, the King began to put on vest and the courtiers were in long cassock, made of wool, closed to the body. The suit was born.

It must be noted that these early coats had their buttons on the right-hand side. When fastened, this allowed the right hand to slip quickly to the sword, which was always worn on the left-hand side. This way of fastening a coat or jacket is to this day a signature of masculinity. Ladies’ coats fasten to the right.

The eighteenth-century man wore a coat, a waistcoat and breeches, mostly made of wool. This costume was a simplification of that of the 1670s.

As an example of an eighteen-century suit, let’s see a portrait of a country gentleman by Joseph Wright of Derby. He is wearing a coat, waistcoat and breeches all in the same cloth and all of one colour. The modern suit is still further on its way. It is helped by the plain shirt collar and black satin stock. The coat must have fastened high across the chest; it would have been worn closed when riding or in bad weather, but it remained open most of the time. This portrait shows the embryo of the double-breasted revers today.

Both single-breasted and double-breasted coats have the high-standing top collar of the time – influenced by the coat of the military uniform.

The English nobility spent a great part of the year on their country estates or visiting other country estates; always interested in sport such as riding, racing and hunting, by the end of the eighteenth-century it had become their all-absorbing occupation. They spent so much of their lives in cloth, buckskin and boots that by the 1780s their style of dress become fashionable wear and was only discarded for special occasions – court attendance or a large rout.

The cut of the riding coat was established and it dominated all men’s clothes for the whole of the 1800s. One of its characteristics was the sleeves of the coat was to be cut high under the armpit and then cleverly to accommodate a narrow sleeve. This allows the arm to stay forward comfortably whilst holding the reins of a horse. The trade calls such a cut ‘high armhole’. A narrow but not tight upper arm of a sleeve is a sign of a good tailor.

The coats began to cut in cloth, a much more pliable material than tightly woven silk, shrinking and stretching by the tailor’s iron could mould it and give a more subtle fit, even if the coat was worn buttoned.

By the nineteenth-century the cut-in tail coat was adopted for all dress occasions, except Court. It became the ‘dress-coat’. The riding coat was another tail coat but with sloping front edges instead of the horizontal front cut. As riding was a popular morning exercise for a gentleman this coat came to be known as a ‘morning coat’ and was also worn on more informal occasions. During the second half of the century it grew in favour and by 1880 was worn on formal occasions.

The frock coat appeared in about 1830s. It was probably of military origin as it fastened high at the neck and was usually double-breasted. It was the same length as the morning coat but the fronts were not cut away.

The Deeside or Tweedside coat appeared in the 1860s. This was the morning coat with its tails cut off that fastened to the neck; such a collar is known as a ‘Ghillie’ collar.

The photograph of King Edward VII shows the new coat worn with the collar pressed open to reveal the collar or the shirt and the tie. The unused top button is retained in the form of a buttonhole. It shows clearly the origin of the single-breasted revers of the lounge suit.

The clothes mentioned above would all have been made by their local tailors; there were no ready-to-wear garments. There are still a lot of starched collars, some of them with wings.

The fashion was greatly influenced by the First World War (1914-1918). Comfort and freedom were the two principles for fashion throughout the freer and easier democratic age. The lounge suit become the universal dress for men. Its jacket had grown gradually out of the morning-coat and its tails were shortened to a point below the hip by the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, they disappeared. At first, the lounge jacket buttoned high at the neck, but gradually the number of buttons diminished from four to three, three to two, and even to one. The waistcoat, which had already been getting lower at the neck, now began to seem superfluous and, in the end, disappeared altogether.

If dress is an art, it is also a trade. The smart young men of the period were used by the clothing industry as unconscious models for the propagation of British fashions and the sale of British products all over the world.