British Classic Style for Men, From Savile Row and Jermyn Street to a Wardrobe You Can Wear Now

The outfit and its two streets

The suit gives the outfit its outline. The shirt collar, the tie and the shoes decide how formal the outfit looks. Change those three, and one suit can serve the office on one day and a relaxed lunch on another.

Savile Row’s trade body, the Savile Row Bespoke Association, traces the quiet look of this Mayfair street back to Beau Brummell. In 1808, Brummell was at the height of his fame as a man of fashion and an adviser on dress to the future Prince Regent, later King George IV. The association calls him “the godfather of Savile Row’s elegant, understated aesthetic”. The outfits below keep to that understated idea, with plain colours and simple ties that do not draw attention. Our guide to dandy style tells more of Brummell’s story.

For shirts, the style looks to Jermyn Street, where the shirtmaker Turnbull & Asser has traded since 1903. This guide keeps to the town dress of those two streets. English country dress, the Hollywood drape and Italian tailoring are related styles with their own stories, so they are left out.

Choosing the jacket: structured or soft

The first choice is the cut, meaning the shape the tailor gives the jacket, above all at the shoulders and chest. There is no single British shape. Each tailoring house has its own cut, and the range runs from firm and structured to soft.

The Rake, a menswear magazine, says British tailoring is known for its structure and links it to the trade’s military past. In the same 2017 article, Colin Heywood, managing director of the tailoring house Anderson & Sheppard, says military tailoring is “much more structured” and is “building everything up and making the person that’s wearing it look powerful”. Gieves & Hawkes shows the military past in its name. It combines two military tailors: Hawkes, which supplied the British Army, and Gieves, which supplied the Royal Navy.

The soft side comes from the same street. At the turn of the 20th century, a Dutch cutter called Frederick Scholte began working on Savile Row; a cutter is the tailor who draws each customer’s paper pattern. Anderson & Sheppard says Scholte’s soft style was “a reaction to the narrow, more constricted tailoring of Victorian times”. Per Anderson, who had trained under Scholte, went on to found Anderson & Sheppard, by the firm’s own account.

Anderson & Sheppard calls its cut the English drape, a London house cut that is separate from the Hollywood drape. The drape jacket has a small, high armhole, extra room at the top of the sleeve and a full chest that falls in soft vertical folds. The shoulders have little padding, and the canvas inside the jacket is very light. Heywood says of this cut, “you move so freely that you’re hardly aware you have a jacket on”. Our guide to the celebrities who wear Anderson & Sheppard tells more of the house’s story.

Other houses sit between the two shapes. Norton & Sons describes a softer shoulder, a chest cut close to the body and a nipped-in waist, with a gentle skirt, the cloth of the jacket below the waist.

A structured jacket and a soft jacket both belong to British classic style, so pick the shape you prefer. When you try on a jacket, look first at the shoulders and chest, where the cuts above differ. A good fit matters, but fit alone does not make a suit British classic. Whatever the shape, ask for room in the chest and the sleeve so that you can move.

The Duke of Windsor: soft from collar to shoes

Scholte’s soft cut had a royal customer. The Rake says Scholte designed it for the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII. Anderson & Sheppard calls the same prince, later the Duke of Windsor, a fan of Scholte’s work.

The Duke’s clothes show how far the soft choice can run through an outfit. The menswear retailer MR PORTER calls his relaxed way with tailoring “dress soft” and credits him with making soft jackets, soft-collared shirts and turn-ups on trousers more popular. MR PORTER also describes one of his overcoats, with soft shoulders and wide lapels that rolled gently down. Permanent Style, a menswear site, says suede shoes stayed in his wardrobe. Our town-lunch outfit and overcoat borrow from that wardrobe.

Shirt, tie and shoes

For town, the everyday base is a white or pale blue shirt with a collar made for a tie. A crisp collar keeps the outfit formal, while a soft collar like the Duke’s relaxes it. The tie and shoes do the same work. A plain or quietly patterned silk tie suits the office, and a knitted tie suits a more casual lunch. Leather lace-up shoes are the town standard, and brown suede makes an outfit more relaxed. Our guide to which shoes to wear with a navy, grey or black suit helps you choose.

Do you need a suit made for you?

No. A good ready-made suit can follow the same tradition as a bespoke one, so buy what fits your life and your budget. Bespoke means a suit made for one man: a cutter draws a paper pattern for him and fits the suit on him. It is a way of making clothes, not the style itself, and it takes time. The Savile Row Bespoke Association says its member houses typically put at least 50 hours of hand work into a two-piece suit. Our guide to Savile Row tailoring explains how bespoke works if you want to order a suit.

Savile Row has sold both kinds of suit. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London says 19th-century mass production made the black suit “a uniform of modernity” open to all. Ready-to-wear, meaning clothes made in standard sizes rather than for one person, then reached the Row in steps. Gieves & Hawkes says Hawkes & Co, the army tailor that bought No. 1 Savile Row, offered ready-to-wear clothes in the 1920s. The London Museum says the designer Hardy Amies set up his fashion house at 14 Savile Row and, in 1961, worked with the retailer Hepworths, now Next, on a ready-to-wear line for men.

Borrow the tailors’ habits when you shop. Tailors begin by asking how a suit will be worn: the tailor Cad & The Dandy, for example, discusses whether you want a wedding suit, a shooting suit or a jacket to become your go-to. At the second fitting, the Savile Row house Henry Poole & Co checks how the trouser hem sits over the shoe. In a shop, ask yourself what the suit is for, and check the trouser length with the shoes you will wear.

Room for a bolder suit

The outfits in this guide start quiet, but Savile Row has also made bold suits. In 1969, the tailor Tommy Nutter opened Nutters of Savile Row with the cutter Edward Sexton. Nutter’s jackets were long, shaped in at the waist and flared below it, with narrow, square shoulders and very wide lapels, worn over straight, parallel trousers. Three of the four Beatles wore Nutter suits on the cover of the Abbey Road album. A 1969 Nutter suit in the V&A, a three-piece in green, brown and red tweed stripes, shows what the museum calls his “wildly broad lapels”.

Colour is the other place a suit can be bold. The V&A says the Savile Row designer Ozwald Boateng has brought back bright peacock colours in powerful new formal wear, and that his signature purple is partly inspired by his Ghanaian heritage.

Lapel width, cloth and colour are where a suit can show personality. The wardrobe below starts with plain, dark suits because they combine easily; a wider lapel or a stronger colour can come later, if you want one.

Black tie

Black tie works differently from the daytime choices above, because the invitation sets the rules. It calls for a dinner jacket, which Americans call a tuxedo, and a black bow tie. The fourth outfit below follows the etiquette guide Debrett’s.

Henry Poole & Co, which became tailor to the Prince of Wales in 1860, tells a story about how the dinner jacket began. This prince was the future King Edward VII, an earlier Prince of Wales than the Duke of Windsor. Henry Poole & Co says that in 1865 it made him a short evening coat in celestial blue, a shortened tailcoat for informal dinners at Sandringham. A tailcoat is a different jacket, divided at the back below the waist into two tails, and Debrett’s black-tie list calls for the dinner jacket instead.

Keep the dinner jacket and the black bow tie for black-tie events. With a day suit, wear a tie, or a patterned bow tie if you like one.

How to wear it now

From here on, the advice is The VOU’s own. Start with seven building blocks, then add clothes as your life needs them. For each suit, choose a structured or a softer jacket, whichever you prefer.

Going further on The VOU

Our guide to classic style for men covers classic dressing more widely. To find the styles that suit you best, take our fashion style quiz. If you want a stylist’s view, our Professional Fashion Style Analysis for Men names your top three styles, based on a detailed form you fill in. The analysis also gives three outfit ideas for each style, in a PDF booklet within a week.