By 1950 the British fashion industry had re-established itself, men demobilised from the armed services were needing new civilian clothes, and there was a renewed interest in their design. In the same way that women were rejecting the wartime line in favour of something of something softer and more fitted, man’s suits began to narrow down as the shoulders and legs gradually lost their excessive width. 

A minority of well-off and fashion-conscious young men pursued a new ideal of elegance which was compared with the lean lines and exquisite tailoring of the early years of the century and they were called the “neo-Edwardians’; the name and some of these ideas were then transformed into the distinctive new working class style of dress of the Teddy Boys, with their long jackets, narrow ‘drainpipe’ trousers and jeans, bootlace ties and heavy crepe-soled shoes.

1950