Arts & Letters Daily answers a question that has bothered me for decades: where did we ever get the idea that the suit was the right way for a gentleman to dress? A good one feels like you're wearing pajamas in public, compared to the rugged clothing suited for work or adventure: denim, wool, leather. The necktie is preposterous, and the only actually useful piece of the suit -- the hat -- has since been discarded by fashion. You don't see "the great men" of any other civilization dressed up like this.
It turns out there is a good reason for the development, one that arises naturally from the roots of the gentleman:
Suits are, in fact, unnatural. The peoples of antiquity, the early Middle Ages, and traditional Asia, Africa, and the pre-Columbian Americas dressed beautifully with a minimum of cutting and sewing. Togas, kimonos, pre-Columbian mantles, dashikis — however luxurious or elegant — were not constructed as second skins.It goes on from there, through revolutions French and Industrial, but that is the root of the thing.
The present male uniform began to emerge in the 14th century as an unintended consequence of military innovation. The body-fitting plate armor that we now admire in museums was replacing mail of the earlier Middle Ages. New craftsmen, the linen armorers, emerged to construct padding to cushion warriors' new exoskeletons, cutting and stitching pieces of cloth to fit the body. Those artisans, Anne Hollander declares in Sex and Suits (Knopf, 1994), "can really count as the first tailors of Europe."
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