How 50 Years of Suits Shaped the Way Men Think About Their Bodies
Modern designers have used tailoring to reveal surprising things about the male physique.
BY MAX BERLINGERJune 3, 2021
No matter how beautiful the fabric, how painstaking the construction, how steep the price, the suit is designed to create an image of the body. Traditionally, this image is one of masculinity and strength—a powerful shoulder, a trim waist, an elongated torso. But over the past 50 years, designers have found new and surprising ways to reveal and discover something deeper about the male physique.
The revolution advanced by the maestro of men’s tailoring, Giorgio Armani, was that the body could simply be revealed by the suit, rather than constricted and exaggerated and reshaped. So it should be no surprise that before Armani became a fashion titan he was a medical student. With surgical precision, the designer ripped out the suit’s fusty innards and rearranged the jacket’s gorge, stance, and lapels, for instance, to yield something new, a silhouette that draped elegantly from the shoulders and fluidly from the hips. Before, men in suits were serious, dull, inconspicuous; in an Armani suit they transformed into something different: an object of desire.