There’s a certain style to formal attire for men. I get it. The suit is like a constraining structure of limitations—some strictures of which cannot be altered—and the expression of the craft is made by what the couturier can do from within those constraints.

This particular image interests me not just because of the clear delineations between the adventurism of the two garments—as in, one is attempting adventurousness and the other just… kneels before the altar of, whatever—but also because Nicholas Hoult’s suit clearly bends the rules as much as it can to express itself. Dior were clearly trying to get as close to loosening the inherent restraint of the suit without actually breaking anything.

I particularly admire the way that the pleats on the jacket move with precise movement which mimics—and, ultimately, the lowest pleat exactly matches—the angle and cut of the lapel. These pleats wrap perpendicular to the inner lapel, like a set of straps or ribs; they look tight and neat, presenting an image of structure while concurrently undermining other structural assumptions.

The jacket is cut like a double-breasted suit, but only has the one button, and so by definition is probably considered single-breasted. Yet the purpose of a single-breasted jacket is to allow the wearer to unbutton it at leisure; I can’t imagine that’s how this jacket was designed to be worn, so in spirit it is double-breasted. If Hoult unbuttoned it, that thing would almost certainly gather in some ungainly clump.

That dissonance alone is interesting; immediately it defies easy definition. Anything with that level of controlled tension must have a jigger in there somewhere, though. Again, it’s conforming to some rules, while breaking others; the shape is a testament to classic formality, but the squareness of it matches the overall geometric pageantry of the thing. Even for a double-breasted jacket, the button draws the jacket front right across his torso, presenting the entire suit as a kind of façade.

Then there’s the tail-coat; the pleated addendum which calls back to the aristocratic formality of coats-and-tails, but disrupts it. Let’s call it a quarter-tail. It looks something akin to a cape or a wing or a cinched robe; it breaks the sense of symmetry the rest of the suit engineers, but in a way which is not chaotic. I’d love to see the back of this thing.

Tails were originally designed as longer coats which could be worn on horseback (which a true coat makes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible); anyone who has any experience of equine dressage competitions and their garb will understand this implicitly. This speaks to the traditions of coats—horses have been, throughout the vast majority of history, symbols of authority and prestige thanks largely to their prohibitive expense—and so it is unlikely that such a statement piece would have added this flair in ignorance of such symbolism.

The quarter-tail still conforms to the vertical movement of the garment, and it’s the rib-cage pleats which are doing the real work of the disruption; the quarter-tail is something else. The whole thing is a dark charcoal—smouldering—and the shirt and tie are, rightly, black. They don’t need to do any of the work and sink into the background like a matte around a masterpiece.

This is a suit which works very hard to suppress its own declaration, to smother its scream with subtlety. It is a work which speaks to ambition, calls back to history and purpose, but is ultimately forward-facing. It works within boundaries, aligns with the status quo, but bends or breaks everything it can within those bounds. It’s also something that Hoult needs to actively engage with; he’s holding the quarter-tail. This could be a moment of movement or an accident or just incidental. But I doubt it. This garment says: I choose this, I’m on my way.

It’s an impressive piece of work. Just look at the monstrosity next to it—I’m sure it’s a great tux and well tailored and all of that other boring bullshit, but it’s just… a dinner suit. Wow, peaked satin lapels, link cuffs and a cummerbund; that’s never been done before. In fact, it was practically a sub-theme of its own at the 2019 Oscars, where this was taken. A million men have worn practically the same thing since they were invented, and only little tucks and shrinks and the cut of the pants have ever really changed.

Speaking of pants, it appears we’re still at the point where so long as they aren’t constricting genitalia their real purpose seems to be little more than to suggest a leg-line and that the wearer can either iron a seam or pay someone to do so on their behalf. They never do anything more than embarrass the wearer about a decade from any given moment in time by the cut of their length and width; that’s it. Oh, I see you were an adult in the 1970s by the look of those pants! With a pant, the best you can really hope for is be inoffensive. They’re a haircut; taking risks often just isn’t worth it in the long run.

Compare all this with Chadwick Boseman’s actually interesting attire at the very same event, which perhaps unsurprisingly was Givenchy, and of the distinctly haute couture variety. It seems that unless men’s outfits are legitimately avant-garde, then they almost universally conform to a number of very particular standards.

Interest in Expressions

Historically, by and large, male fashion has always been conservative by default and not flashy in the way that female fashion is. I often wonder why that is. In my view, to understand the purpose of fashion—and any kind of clothing which is not simply made out of a particular necessity—one needs to understand what features the garments are expressing, whose gaze they are drawing, and, ultimately, what message that combination of features are sending to potential mates or competitors.

There are, naturally, many aspects of fashion which also involve personal taste and expression of personality and flair—but these very features are also ultimately signifiers of a particular kind of messaging which relates to gaining a competitive advantage or, at the very least, fulfilling a niche.

I would posit that male ‘attractiveness’ places far, far less emphasis on physical attributes precisely because good genes are useful but also regressive insofar as males can usually only pass their unique genetics—what it is that makes them male; the mutated chromosome—to male children. X chromosomes are carried by both sexes in the majority of configurations, but only males usually carry Y chromosomes—though this generalisation obviously doesn’t account for the significant variety and nuance across the genetic diaspora.

The point being that (basically… very basically) women are capable of passing on any gene from amongst their female lineage, which makes their genetic expressions more important; men only pass on their male lineage—the Y chromosome—if their own children are biologically male. Therefore, if at any point a male fails (or refuses, or is unable) to successfully raise a male child, their entire Y chromosome stock ceases to exist. One wonders if this, at least in part, inspired concepts like primogeniture and the obsessive focus on male heirs throughout patriarchal history. It might explain the wretchedly obsessive behaviour of monarchs like Henry VIII.

The Y chromosome is also full of what is called ‘junk’ DNA, probably because like almost all creatures our species are female by default. Hence, the most important factor of male-ness, which is basically a mutation, is essentially being not-female. Whereas, culturally and linguistically, we are conditioned to think the opposite; that “man” is the default state of personhood—mankind, humanity, etcetera; even woman and female are derivatives of the presumed defaults, ‘man’ and ‘male’—and therefore women are to be defined as not-men.

Yet male genetics are locked in a desperate and fatalistic game wherein a single failure at any branch along its tree extinguishes that genetic code completely. Not only that, but in terms of reproductive success, in my experience there are two particular factors which are likely to ensure a male’s offspring are successful. These are both more important than a pretty face or arms like tree trunks (which—like make-up—are contextual or cultural flourishes, not genetic markers).

The two factors are authority (or status) and access to, or control over, material resources. Have you ever wondered how so many portly, average-looking, middle-aged multi-millionaires seem to be able to attract some twenty-something model, who surely has a dazzling array of choices when it comes to a potential partner? That kind of trope is familiar to anyone who has ever picked up a tabloid paper, but why is it so consistently the case? Usually the focus is on the woman; she’s a gold-digger or married him for his money, but the point is that the money must mean something, or they wouldn’t commit to a long-term relationship with such a person, much less risk having children with them. As Lorelei Lee observes in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:

Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn’t marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, doesn’t it help?!

It is interesting that both of these factors—authority and, in particular, wealth—may persist even in the absence, sometimes permanent, of the male themselves. Given the high costs of male competition, it is easy to see how this would have been—and in many places still is—an important aspect in regard to the potential success of offspring in less safe environments. We, as a species, take an awful risk having two sexes. Males fight, kill, and are killed, quite a bit; injury is even more common. Even in our “modern” or “civilised” society this kind of behaviour persists, but it is especially evident in the past. It’s why we glorify war and lionise “honour”, which basically translates to not asking questions about why young men need to solve the problems, with force, which old men create or, at best, perpetuate. Leaving resources behind is a huge competitive advantage in such a situation. Or, say, when the male spouse is considerably older than the female who bears his children.

Most men who have been in any kind of formal environment where status is important but where clear hierarchical lines have not been drawn will surely have noticed the almost obsessive banter about the slight distinctions between suits. That price, for example (or even just perceived price), plays a large part in a suit’s prestige. Not least because a great many men are utterly clueless when it comes to fashion and have no means nor capacity for assessing it with any other lens than prescribed material value.

My guess is that most blokes who managed to snag a Hugo Boss suit for a bargain basement price would be more likely to inform his mates with appropriate faux-nonchalance what its full price was, and be secretly pleased that it wasn’t Givenchy because he’d have struggled to pronounce the name. The competitive distinctions among males who possess similar volumes of wealth and status can actually become comical.

There is a wonderful scene in the film American Psycho which delineates this situation precisely, when Patrick Bateman and his compatriots—all so wealthy, narcissistic, and useless, that there is no apparent difference between them; one of the film’s running bits is their own inability to tell one another apart—all sneer and force smiles at one another as they pass around their bespoke business cards. To a casual observer, of course, these cards are all essentially identical, their hyper-vigilance to these inanities being the point of the scene’s black humour (and their callous disregard for anything outside their narrow orbit being a theme of the film as a whole). The cards are all white, with a name and title listed. However, in the rarefied air atop the zenith of this pseudo-aristocracy, the slightest differences between inlaid or embossed text, or the colours of ‘bone’ and ‘cream’ become outrageous statements of status.

It is, generally speaking, far less nuanced further down the scale, where more broad assumptions of net worth can be more easily discerned, and those distinctions made clearer. It’s much easier to compare wealth between those who have little of it to flaunt, precisely because the investment in that display is so much proportionally larger. It takes a real risk to drop three grand on a suit when you are living week to week and your monthly rent is more than half of your total income. Besides which, that suit won’t matter much if it isn’t matched with some nice shoes or you turn up to the gala event in your rusted-out Datsun.

The point is that males don’t actually compete for attention via fashion: they have authority and material wealth to do that for them and they possibly become quite confused when aesthetics come into play at all. Perhaps also because aesthetics traditionally revolve around their own gaze, and not that of women. In which case, I’d argue that it’s safe to assume they are competing not with women in mind, but each other. It’s an easy mistake to make to assume that male displays of dominance are ultimately about women at all, especially given the importance of the typically more rigid status hierarchies which males tend to form.

Another example of this is musculature. While some women undoubtedly love chiselled abs and a pair of muscled arms, more often than not many men who body-build find themselves fielding compliments not from the women who are their presumed targets, but other men. While physical size, as well as force and violence, are intrinsic elements of many power dynamics, some modern men seem to misunderstand the limits of the expression of such forms of power. This is not to say that all body-builders have this intent in mind; far from it.

Yet, I imagine that someone like Rupert Murdoch, a frail octogenarian billionaire who nevertheless wields considerable actual power, would pay very little competitive heed to some insecure chad who peacocks around a gym with “I do alpha shit” plastered over their t-shirt. That kind of base expression might have some currency in a nightclub or on a random street confrontation, but in any situation more sophisticated than that it becomes practically irrelevant. Never mind that what we culturally (that is, in conventional social parlance rather than expert understanding of animal hierarchies) consider “alpha” behaviour is apparently only observed in domesticated or imprisoned animals; ones who artificially mimic our hierarchies, not necessarily their own natural ones.

Perhaps that’s why suits don’t really matter. And because they don’t really matter, they don’t really change. It takes considerable conscious effort to redefine something that has worked so well for so long.