You never forget your first M&S suit. I bought mine when I was 22, fresh out of university and making a disastrous attempt at being a banker in the City of London.
It was grey, pin-striped, too flared in the trousers and too narrow in the lapels. But it did the job it was intended to: unshowy, dependable, affordable. And by making those mistakes, I gradually worked out what looked good and what to avoid.
Ten years later, when I won the world's most unglamorous bet — collecting £2,000 on Michael Howard becoming Tory leader in 2003 — I spent the proceeds on two suits from Huntsman, one of the finest tailors in Savile Row, the home of the British suit in Mayfair, London. I wore the trousers until they fell apart, but I still have the miraculous jackets.
They continue to flatter me and make me look half a stone lighter. The late Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones wore Huntsman suits.
The suit wasn't just our national costume, it became the world's costume for formal wear. Pictured: Paul Whitehouse and Mark Williams in The Fast Show
Just like Prince Charles, who favours tailor-made suits, he never went out of style. While his bandmates wore outlandish, fashionable outfits that now look outdated, Watts's suits remained timelessly cool.
The suit wasn't just our national costume, it became the world's costume for formal wear. In Japan, they call the formal business suit 'Saburo' — their pronunciation of Savile Row.
British suits are literally synonymous with formal wear across the globe. How sad, then, that we are now waving goodbye to one of our greatest inventions.
One hundred years since we introduced the suit to the world (we'll come to its origins in a moment), fashion and the Covid pandemic are killing it off. And, what's worse, suits are being replaced by the most terrifying expression in the English language: 'smart-casual'.
Marks & Spencer has been one of Britain's biggest sellers of men's suits ever since 1939, when it sold its first flannel ones. But it emerged this weekend only 110 of its 254 clothing stores still stock suits — that's well under half of them.
Formal clothing for work and leisure was already on the way out — but then the pandemic struck in 2020. Sales went into freefall as people worked from home and, in Zoom calls, wore anything they wanted — or nothing at all — below the waist.
In the year to April, sales of formal wear at M&S collapsed by 15 per cent online and an extraordinary 72 per cent in shops, compared with a year earlier.
It emerged this weekend only 110 of the 254 Marks and Spencer clothing stores still stock suits
The upmarket suit chain TM Lewin shut all 66 of its UK shops last year and Moss Bros reported pre-tax losses of £7.4 million for the year to January 2020
Over the same period, sales of casual wear were up 61 per cent online. The same slump applies across the board in other shops.
The analyst Kantar says British shoppers bought two million men's suits in the year up to this July, compared with 4.3 million five years ago and 5 million a decade ago. The upmarket suit chain TM Lewin shut all 66 of its UK shops last year.
And Moss Bros, the world-famous formal-wear shop, celebrating its 170th anniversary this year, reported pre-tax losses of £7.4 million for the year to January 2020.
It was delisted from the London Stock Exchange last year. And £100 million was wiped off annual suit sales from 2015 to 2019.
It gets worse. Workers returning to the office are opting for what the fashion world has recently termed the 'broken suit' — in old parlance a jacket and trousers.
GQ magazine recently ran an article about the 'broken suit' talking about combinations which suggest effort and care, as well as a touch of 'studied
