The great chain of being well-suited starts with awe. This amalgam has been shared by all the interesting persona I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing, from bloggers and arbiters of style to journalists. One often finds the beginnings in childhood, in the form of a groomed grandmother, rakish uncle, tailored father or in the many creations we enjoy through the television. These are figures that raise awe. Characters like Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, John Steed and Sebastian Flyte would still work as vehicles of drama without their shared neat looks. With fabrics, weaves, patterns and colours they are much more. If not the events in childhood, then the pangs of adolescence will raise new thoughts towards style. To blend in one must dress accordingly, as shining out takes much more and is allowed to fewer still. Clothes, then, become an important part of growing up and yet another skill men are presumed to master. As with all life cycles, books offer advice for those with patience.

Products from Pukimo Raivio

Kiton, grey sports jacket, size 50EU
Ralph Lauren, Black Label suit, size 52EU

G. Bruce Boyer, a noted American menswear journalist and editor, whose articles and essays have been published in Cigar Aficionado, Esquire, The New York Times, GQ and Town&Country, among others. Instead of fashion, Boyer has focused on tailored, classic apparel and often goes to great lengths to rarify articles with quotes and quips from the finest pens. His text Politics, Dress, and Image begins with a quote from Dickens’s Oliver Twist, another piece, The Business Suit, is flanked by a statement from 1627, given by a preacher in Balm from Gilead to Recover Conscience. Boyer is distinguished due to the strength of his prose. This is inevitable as he was a professor of English literature for seven years before venturing off to pen menswear articles for Town&Country. Like he states in an interview with Keikari, ‘I’d say I’m interested in clothing in both a fashion and an academic sense.’

I feel most current menswear articles are but shoddily disguised advertisements for the highest payer, but this was not always the case. Before Boyer came Gentry magazine, Esquire, Apparel Arts and similar publications aimed to describe the latest changes in dress and etiquette along with advances in materials. While they did serve to promote certain goods and services over others in line with editors, the texts had – and still have – journalistic merit. Boyer raised the medium on another level by applying high style to everyday commodities, a sort of enjoyable mix of sense and sensibility. While apparel do raise spirits and mark boundaries between the everyday and occasion, they are still clothes. While prose writing and cultural history can be applied to elevate the things we wear, ultimately they are still meant for use.

Eminently Suitable – The Elements of Style in Business Attire is a collection of Boyer’s essays. Originally offered in 1990 by W.W. Norton&Company, no new prints have been published. Copies are scarce, but not scarce enough to make it an expensive collector’s piece. Should the reader become interested in extending his bookshelf, copies can be found on eBay and various webstores specializing in used books. The tome is partly dated, some stores have closed down and wares have changed with the times. Sedately illustrated, Eminently Suitable is not a book for beginners. It does offer a glossary of tailoring terms for impressing random acquaintances, but the reader is partly left in dark in Boyer’s verse. No examples of coherent combinations for beginners are pictured. Instead Boyer offers selected pieces on the history of clothing, their semantics, dress according to body types, the differences between RTW, MTM and bespoke – with high prose.

For the most part, the print is still among the finest menswear books in English, especially the essay on sprezzatura is elementary reading for any man. Boyer’s essays serve as vehicles for learning, acquainting the reader with some basics of style and its lexicon. These are simple. As in so many of life’s great things, in tailored style simplicity is key. ‘Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.’

Eminently Suitable contains the following paragraphs:

• Preface
• Politics, Dress, and Image
• The Business Suit
• Drape, Zoot, Drape
• Suiting the Man
• Fitting Everyman
• The Art of Dressing
• Contemporary Design and Designers
• Grooming for Business
• Glossary and Appendix