Why Tailors Hate Skinny Suits

Chris Panicker; Getty Images (left), Courtesy of Anthology (right)

A great suit is unlike anything else in your closet—timeless and elegant, certainly, but also difficult to get right. The process of choosing, buying, and caring for fine tailoring is often fraught with tough decisions, confusing jargon, and conflicting opinions. That’s why we’ve assembled an all-star roster of the world’s most knowledgeable menswear experts to definitively answer all of your sartorial questions. Welcome to GQ’s Ask a Tailor.

Tailors are mostly pretty agreeable folks. They’ll happily spend hours chatting with you about the perfect lapel roll or why a floating canvas is superior to a fused one. They’ll also help to steer you towards good sartorial choices, away from bad ones, and—if they’re really good at their job—make it seem like the whole thing was your idea all along.

If you want to make a traditional tailor roll their eyes, however, ask them to make you a skinny suit. They’ll probably do it (because it’s their job to give you what you want at the end of the day) but they will also silently shake their heads in dismay and perhaps cry a little inside. To understand tailors’ near-universal dislike for the definitive suit of the 2010s, we asked a few of the world’s most respected names in menswear to break it down for us.

Reason 1: Skinny suits have an expiration date

An old-school craftsperson like NYC tailor Leonard Logsdail prides himself on making clothes his clients will wear for decades. A suit based on what’s currently fashionable, by comparison, has a much shorter shelf life, and he endeavors to impart this distinction to clients who come in asking for skinny suits. “Do you want to be wearing this suit in five years?” he poses. “If so, you're going to look like you're wearing a suit that’s five years old. Because by that time the fashions will have changed.”

At Drake’s, creative director Michael Hill is of the same camp. “Proportions evolve and change over time, but it's not for us to follow that,” Hill says, noting that the tweed blazer he’s wearing is 15 years old and looks as rakish today as it did in 2009. “We're trying to make a garment that's going to last 20 years, and I think it's a question of being confident about what works for you, rather than what works for the fashion houses.” Fashion, Hill concedes, is always going to be a significant element of menswear, but a suit—especially a suit you plan to wear for 15 years or more—should be part of a much longer view of your wardrobe, not just what looks good this season.

Reason 2: Skinny suits aren’t comfortable (or flattering) on a lot of bodies

“There's a common misconception that a good suit should be tight and constrictive, and it's not the case at all,” says Campbell Carey, the creative director at Huntsman on Savile Row. “I hate to sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but there's nothing worse than someone who really shouldn't be in a skinny suit trying to pull it off. It just looks uncomfortable.”

Reigning elder statesman of menswear (and avid jazz fan) Bruce Boyer has seen more than his share of trends come and go over the last six-plus decades, and he strongly agrees with Carey on this point. “Just because the style is for a tight little suit with skinny legs, skinny lapels and a little short jacket, if you're a big beefy guy you're going to look like somebody poured you into it and you forgot to say ‘when,’ ” he says. “You have to know what is attainable for you in your life, your lifestyle and your physiognomy.”

Reason 3: Skinny suits don’t move

Mark Cho, co-founder of The Armoury, has particularly strong feelings about skinny suits. “I've always hated [them],” he says. In addition to the reasons above, he raises an interesting point about the rise of skinny suits in the social media era: “Tailoring is beautiful in motion but unfortunately, because we're all so obsessed with Instagram, we never really notice what these things look like in motion,” he says. “Skinny suits look the worst in motion. When a suit is cut with a little more volume, however, it adds certain drama when you're moving around. It’s a lot more elegant.”

Reason 4: It’s really hard to achieve a nice lapel roll if your lapel is only an inch wide

“The skinny suit was either a very lazy or a very smart marketing idea,” muses Buzz Tang, co-founder of The Anthology. In addition to requiring less fabric (a significant cost savings for fast-fashion retailers) skinny suits lend themselves perfectly to the kind of flat, lifeless, fused lapels that are characteristic of cheaply made suits, he explains.

Reason 5: A lot of those skinny suits are going to end up in the landfill

We’re all doing what we can, in ways big and small, to help avert a plethora of looming environmental catastrophes, and buying clothes designed to last a decade (instead of a season), can be an important part of that. “The idea of sustainability is to have a wardrobe of good conservative clothing, keep it forever and maintain it,” says Boyer. “It's the exact opposite of fast fashion, where every six months we've got to change our whole style of doing things. I can't think of a more wasteful, or a more polluting way to buy clothing.”

Got a tailoring question of your own? Hit us up at gqaskatailor@gmail.com.

Originally Appeared on GQ

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