How the Jacket Loosened Its Grip on the Working Man
The structured two-piece suit was the uniform of office life for the better part of a century. Then came the soft shoulder, the unlined coat, and a Neapolitan with a scarf tied just so. This is the story of how tailoring learned to relax.
The suit did not die suddenly. It loosened, slowly, over four decades, as the shoulder pad shrank and the canvas thinned and the whole architecture of the thing gave way to something that moved with the body rather than against it. By the time the sport coat had quietly replaced the suit in most American offices, the change was already complete. We simply had not noticed it happening.
To understand the shift, start in Naples. Southern Italian tailoring had always been lighter than its northern counterpart, partly a response to heat and partly a matter of temperament. The spalla camicia, the shirt-style shoulder with its gathered sleevehead, and the barely-there canvas produced a jacket that looked lived-in from the first wearing. The word for the attitude was sprezzatura, borrowed from Castiglione's sixteenth-century courtier's manual, meaning a studied carelessness. In practice it meant a cuff left unbuttoned, a tie knotted loosely, a jacket worn as though you had not thought about it at all.
No one embodied this better than Lino Ieluzzi, who took over his family's Milan shop, Al Bazar, on Via Scarlatti in the 1970s. Ieluzzi became a fixture of the street-style photography that gathered outside the Pitti Uomo fairs in Florence from the mid-2000s. His signature was the pronounced tie dimple, the high-rise trouser, and a general refusal to look like he was trying. The look travelled fast through the early menswear internet.
Meanwhile in Japan something more radical was underway. Rei Kawakubo showed Comme des Garcons in Paris from 1981, and her approach to tailoring treated the jacket as material to be questioned. Seams were exposed, linings removed, proportions deliberately unsettled. The deconstructed jacket that followed, taken up by designers across Antwerp and Tokyo through the 1990s, stripped the garment of its rigid internal scaffolding and asked what a coat was once you took the structure out.
The British, custodians of the structured drape, adapted on their own terms. Houses on Savile Row that had built reputations on firm shoulders began offering softer, unstructured cuts through the 1990s and 2000s. Richard James opened on the Row in 1992 with brighter cloth and a looser silhouette, and the old guard followed where custom demanded. The sport coat, worn with odd trousers, became acceptable business dress across London and New York as the decade turned.
It was the Japanese retailers who named the thing and sold it back to everyone. Beams, founded in Tokyo in 1976, and United Arrows, which followed in 1989, codified smart casual as a distinct and legible mode. They paired tailored jackets with knitwear and chinos, blended American workwear with Italian cut, and published it all in thick catalogues that functioned as manuals. What had been an attitude in Naples became, in Tokyo, a system you could learn and buy. The suit survives, of course. But it is now a choice rather than a given, which is a different thing entirely.
Why buy pre-loved
The soft tailoring of this era was built to improve with wear. Unlined Neapolitan coats and the earliest Beams and United Arrows pieces have broken in exactly as their makers intended, the canvas settled, the shoulder relaxed. Much of the best work came from small Italian ateliers and Japanese runs that no longer exist or have changed hands. Buying second-hand is often the only way to find them. You also skip the stiff first season entirely, inheriting a jacket that has already learned the shape of a body and wears, as the Neapolitans always wanted, as though you had not thought about it.