By Zachary Costello
I have decided that I dislike slim fit. There, I have said it. It is not a particularly sophisticated position, nor is it one that I expect to find myself defending at dinner, but having spent an unreasonable amount of time trying on men's shirts and jackets that appear to have been designed for someone with the physique of a coat hanger, I feel the matter deserves to be addressed.
My objection is not to clothes that fit. Quite the opposite. I like a well-cut jacket, a shirt with a proper shoulder and a pair of trousers that knows where the leg is going. The problem is that “slim fit” has somehow become confused with “make the entire garment smaller.” A shirt can be beautifully shaped without being tight across the chest, and a pair of trousers can have a neat line without requiring the wearer to negotiate with them every time he sits down. Somewhere between tailoring and Lycra, menswear seems to have lost its way.
The shirt is where this becomes particularly ridiculous. You take your usual size into the changing room, put it on and discover that the buttons have developed a personal interest in one another. The collar is fine, the cuffs are fine and the sleeves are perfectly respectable, but the slightest movement produces the uncomfortable feeling that you are about to become the first man in history to be defeated by his own Oxford cloth. Then, inevitably, the label tells you that it is “slim fit”, as though this explains everything and absolves the manufacturer of responsibility.
What annoys me most is that the idea behind slim fit is not actually bad. Men should generally look relatively neat. The trouble is that neatness comes from proportion, not compression. Look at old photographs of Cary Grant, David Niven or almost any well-dressed man between the 1930s and 1960s and you will notice that their clothes follow the body without desperately attempting to cling to it. Jackets have shape through the shoulder and waist, trousers have a proper rise and there is enough cloth to allow a person to move. They look slim because they are well proportioned, not because somebody has taken several inches out of every seam.
This is also why I have become increasingly fond of vintage tailoring. Older clothes often have a generosity about them which modern menswear seems to regard as suspicious. A vintage jacket can have a slightly broader shoulder, a higher armhole and a little more room through the body, yet somehow look considerably smarter than its contemporary equivalent. It is particularly noticeable in British tailoring, where the objective was historically to create a good silhouette rather than to demonstrate exactly how narrow a man's waist happened to be that morning.
And I refuse to believe that the answer is simply to buy everything oversized instead. That is another modern misunderstanding. There is a very large and rather beautiful middle ground between something being skin-tight and looking as though it was borrowed from one's father. The answer is a garment with proper proportions, made from good cloth, which has enough room to move but enough structure to retain its shape. In other words, what we used to call tailoring.
Perhaps this is why the current obsession with slimness feels particularly strange when viewed against the rest of fashion. Women have spent years being told that clothes should accommodate different bodies, while men are still routinely offered trousers in which sitting down becomes an act of considerable commitment. Menswear has somehow managed to make comfort sound unfashionable, when some of the most elegant men in history were dressed in clothes that allowed them to eat lunch.
There is a simple solution, of course, and it involves something our grandparents understood rather better than we do: alterations. Buy the jacket that fits your shoulders. Buy the trousers that fit your waist and seat. Buy the shirt that fits your neck. Then take it to someone who knows what they are doing. A tailor can remove cloth rather more successfully than he can manufacture it, which is why starting with something slightly generous is rarely a bad idea.
Clothes should also be allowed to acquire a relationship with their wearer. Wool relaxes, cotton softens, leather moulds itself to the body and a good jacket develops a crease in precisely the places it is supposed to. That is part of the pleasure of owning clothes. I rather like the idea that a favourite jacket should eventually look as though it belongs to you. A garment which begins life already stretched to its absolute limit has rather less room for a future.
So no, I am not campaigning for enormous trousers or for the return of every unfortunate feature of 1970s menswear. I simply want men to stop believing that looking smart means wearing the smallest garment they can physically get into. Good clothes should make you look like the best version of yourself, not like a man who has accidentally been shrink-wrapped.
Give me a proper jacket, a little room through the trouser and a shirt that allows me to reach for the salt without losing a button. I don't think that is asking very much.
And if the label says “slim fit”, I shall probably leave it on the rail.