Business attire for men

The super number tells you how fine the wool fibre is, not how good the cloth is. The higher the number, the thinner and softer the yarn, and the smoother the finished cloth feels in your hand. What almost nobody is told is that fineness is bought at the cost of durability. A Super 150s or above feels wonderful, but it creases more readily, it shines at the stress points sooner, and it wears through faster. For a suit you put on every week, Super 110s to Super 130s is the sensible range. Save the higher numbers for a suit you wear once or twice a month. Once cloth is being cut to your own measurements, the fit will do far more for how you look than the number on the label. You can see the ranges we work with in our collections.

It describes what is holding the front of the jacket in shape. A fused jacket has a stiffening layer glued to the back of the cloth. It is quick and cheap to make, it feels boardy, and over the years it can bubble or lift away. A canvassed jacket has a separate layer of horsehair canvas stitched in, floating between the cloth and the lining. It moves as you move, and it slowly takes the shape of your chest, which is why a canvassed jacket often fits better after five years than it did on the first day. Half canvassed means the canvas runs through the chest and lapels and the rest of the front is fused. Fully canvassed means it runs the whole length. You can check a jacket yourself: pinch the cloth a few inches below the bottom button, one finger inside and one outside, and pull gently. If you can feel a loose third layer between the two, there is canvas in there.

Navy first, charcoal second, mid-grey third. Navy is the single most useful suit you can own. It works in daylight, it flatters most people, and it takes almost any shirt and tie you put with it. Charcoal is the natural second because it is a shade more serious, which helps in a formal or client-facing setting. Only once you have both is it worth adding a check, a stripe or a lighter grey. If you can afford one suit and one only, make it navy, and put the money into the fit rather than into a third colour.

Three at a minimum, five if you can manage it. Wool needs roughly 24 to 48 hours to recover its shape after a day of wear, so a suit worn on Monday is better left until Wednesday. Three suits in rotation gives each one a proper rest. Five means each is worn about once a week, and each will last years longer as a result. It sounds back to front, but owning more suits makes every one of them wear out more slowly, so the cost per year of wear goes down rather than up.

Usually not, and it is the most common mistake we see. Black sits near the top of the formality scale, and it is traditionally an evening and funeral colour rather than a working one. Under office lighting and in daylight it reads stark rather than sharp, and it needs high contrast to look right, which limits your shirts and forces black shoes every time. Navy and charcoal do the same job better and are what almost every business dress code has in mind. Keep black for evening events and the occasions that call for it.

The break is the fold the trouser makes where it meets your shoe, and it is one of the last things your tailor sets. There are four rough positions. No break, where the hem just kisses the shoe and a little sock shows when you stand. A quarter break, one small crease. A half break, a light fold resting on the shoe. A full break, a generous fold. For a business suit, a quarter or half break is the safe ground, current without looking fashion-led, and flattering on most builds. No break can read as trendy in a conservative office, and a full break needs a wider trouser to carry it properly. Bring the shoes you will actually wear with the suit to your fitting, because changing the shoe changes the break.

You can, but it rarely looks as good as people hope. A suit jacket and its trousers are cut from the same cloth and are meant to age at the same rate, so wearing the jacket twice as often leaves you with two halves that no longer match. A smooth business worsted also has very little texture of its own, so on its own it tends to read as an orphaned suit jacket rather than a blazer. If you want a jacket that genuinely works with odd trousers, it is worth having one made for that job in a cloth with more surface interest. Our casual wear page covers those.

Shine is crushed wool. Friction and pressure flatten the tiny fibres on the surface until they reflect light instead of scattering it, which is why it appears first on the seat, the inside thighs and the elbows. Sitting on leather car seats and office chairs speeds it up, and so does heavy pressing at the dry cleaner. Light shine can sometimes be lifted by steaming through a damp cloth and brushing the surface back up, but once it is set into the weave it does not really come out. Prevention is the only reliable answer: rest the suit between wears, brush it down, and clean it rarely. Because it is nearly always the trousers that go first, ordering a second pair at the same time, in the same cloth from the same batch, is the single most effective thing you can do, and matching that cloth years later is often impossible. If your trousers have already gone, our alterations service can tell you whether anything can be saved.