It's all about knowing the difference between style and fashion. Fashion comes and goes but style is forever.
Style transcends fashion, as Mr. Harry Rosen once noted.
For example, one day last week I wore a 16 year old suit. Yes, you read that correctly. 16 years old. It's a made-to-measure suit from Harry Rosen and some details are a bit dated now although I've had the jacket and pants re-cut to fit the current slimmer silhouette. The jacket has side vents and a ticket pocket and, last year, I had a tailor narrow the thighs and the bottoms on the pants; I also had the tailor take in the sides on the jacket because I've lost weight since. There's no way most people would recognize the suit as being 16 years old. And it still fits me very well, actually.
My point is to choose classic timeless clothing when building your wardrobe. Try not to buy too many "trendy" pieces unless you plan to discard them after only one or two seasons. Men's fashions are pretty safe because they dont change a whole lot and when they do, they change very slowly. Thank goodness for that.
I really don't own as many suits as I used to. I'm very picky as to what I buy and for the past several years, I've been wearing more sport coats because I like the larger-scale patterns on sport coats. The last suit I bought was in 2008 (made-to-measure, $1900) and I also ordered two made-to-measure sportcoats ($1095 each). I haven't bought anything new since then.
Basically, I've been trying to re-work my wardrobe. I've been resorting to having older suits re-cut by a tailor to give them a more contemporary silhouette simply because I haven't been able to find anything I like in what I want.
Today, I was rummaging through one of my closets and found a suit I bought from
Henry Singer waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1990.
Yes, I said 1990.
1990.
As in 21 years ago.
To my surprise, it actually fit extremely well considering it was one full size smaller than what I've been wearing for the past 18 years or so! I've lost around 18 pounds during the past year and it was a nice surprise to see this suit fit so well again.
Now, let's examine this. The jacket's shoulder span is the same width as my most recent made-to-measure jackets and the jacket length is also the same. The waist on the pants fits perfectly. The pants are now a bit long on me (I wore my pants much longer back then) so I will have my tailor shorten them a tad but the width of the thighs and bottoms are just a bit wider than my more current pants but the difference is very slight. The jacket is a double-breasted model and has a center vent. I compared this suit to pics of the more recent double-breasted suits featured in magazines and there's really not much difference. And believe me, I know my stuff. Thank goodness that I had the foresight (or intuition or know-how) to choose a classic silhouette even waaaaaaaaaaaaay back when I didn't know a whole lot about suits. It was around 1990 (or very late 1980s) when jackets were starting to feature extremely wide shoulders and virtually all jackets featured closed vents (a.k.a. no vents). Sure, these pants are double-pleated but, then again, pleated pants are coming back--although at an arthritic snail's pace.
Yup.
sorry darn, about fashion and wardrobe, but I actually enjoyed reading that.
