Style de coupe · United States
The American sack suit
Straight, soft and undarted: a coat designed to fit many bodies acceptably rather than one perfectly.
The sack suit hangs straight from a natural, unpadded shoulder with no front darts and little waist shaping, usually with a three-button front rolled to the middle button. It is the one original American contribution to cut, and it was designed for the rack.
A garment shaped by manufacturing
Remove the darts and the waist suppression and you remove most of what makes a jacket specific to one body. That is a flaw in a bespoke coat and a feature in a manufactured one: a sack fits a wide range of men tolerably, which is exactly what a garment sold in graded sizes needs to do.
Brooks Brothers is the firm most associated with it, and the American universities are where it became a uniform. The look (soft shoulder, three-roll-two front, flapped patch pockets, hooked centre vent) is the basis of what is now called Ivy.
The details
A soft, unpadded natural shoulder; no front darts; little waist suppression; a three-button front with the lapel rolled to the middle button; a single hooked centre vent; and frequently patch or flapped patch pockets. Trousers are cut with a full rise and often no pleats.
The lapel roll is the detail collectors care about: a properly rolled three-roll-two front curves softly over the top button rather than being pressed flat.
The honest assessment
The sack does not flatter most figures the way a shaped coat does; it makes almost everyone look somewhat rectangular. Its defenders regard that as the point, an anti-vain garment, deliberately unassertive, and there is something to that argument.
It has also aged unusually well as a shape, because it never depended on a fashionable waistline. A 1962 sack jacket looks dated in its cloth and its lapel width, not in its architecture.
En un coup d'œil
Maisons travaillant dans cette tradition
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Brooks Brothers
New York · 1818Brooks Brothers is America's oldest clothing retailer, which popularised ready-made suits in standard sizes, the button-down collar and the American Ivy look.
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Martin Greenfield Clothiers
New YorkMartin Greenfield Clothiers is a Brooklyn suit factory, run by a Holocaust survivor, that makes custom suits and produces for several American brands.
Crédits photographiques 3
- A natural-shoulder sack jacket: Original art · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale original art
- Brooks Brothers 938 Broadway: Photograph · Beyond My Ken · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
- An illustration of the house's recorded cut: soft shoulder, full canvas chest, american, moderately structured. Not a photograph of the house's own work.: Original art · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale original art