United States ★

The sack suit

The American contribution to cut is the sack: an undarted jacket hanging straight from a natural shoulder, with a soft chest, a three-button front rolled to the middle button, and no waist suppression to speak of. Brooks Brothers popularised it, the Ivy League adopted it, and by the 1950s it was what an educated American man wore to work.

It is easy to be condescending about the sack (it flatters almost nobody's figure in the way a shaped coat does), but it was a deliberate and coherent answer to a different question. It fits a range of bodies acceptably rather than one body perfectly, which is exactly what a garment sold off a rack needs to do. Ivy style is the sack suit's aesthetic afterlife, and it remains more influential in Japan than in America.

Ready-to-wear, and what it cost

American manufacturers industrialised clothing earlier and more completely than anyone else, driven first by Civil War uniform contracts, which produced the first systematic body-measurement data, and then by sizing systems, standardised patterns and fusible interlinings. The consequence was that ordinary people could buy a suit that fitted approximately, cheaply, immediately.

The consequence for craft was severe. Domestic tailoring shrank to a handful of firms; the great American makers (Oxxford in Chicago, Hickey Freeman in Rochester, Martin Greenfield in Brooklyn) became exceptions rather than a trade. Most tailoring bought in the United States today is made in Italy, or made abroad to American brands' specifications.