
The double-breasted suit jacket is essential to the image of 1930s Warner Bros gangsters, 1980s Salomon Brothers bankers, and, this season, everyone and his brother. Or so it seems. At every turn, high-end designers, established suitmakers and upstart tailor shops are doubling down on double-breasted suits and blazers. It is a bold look: The overlapping front closure and multiple buttons strike the eye with a force that their single-breasted brethren cannot match. We live in interesting times that call for interesting clothes, and though it has been out of style for some time, the double-breasted suit fits the cultural climate again. With its structure and extra folds of coverage, it amounts to a flashy form of armour. We might begin, as fashion people so often do, by name-dropping Raf Simons, an innovative industry darling whose debut collection early this year for Calvin Klein’s 205 W39 NYC label included double-breasted wool blazers in dark green, glen plaid and steel blue. Touted as taking cues from “classic Wall Street tailoring” and yet contemporary in their relative slimness, the garments featured six buttons in front (two of them functional) and peak lapels rakishly pointing to the natural lines of the shoulders. Simons may be the buzziest among a crop of designers who recently started jobs at fashion houses and promptly sent DBs strutting down their newly inherited runways. His peers include Haider Ackermann, whose first collection as creative director at Berluti included a couple of eye-catching examples, and Ingo Wilts, chief brand officer at Hugo Boss AG, who used DBs to amp up the wattage of the power suit. And in London, Stella McCartney’s first fall collection for men featured the cut prominently. Then there is Alessandro Sartori, whose debut collection for Ermenegildo Zegna Couture epitomised the ways designers are rethinking the DB suit to woo a generation disinclined to think about suits at all. “I consider them very stylish yet versatile,” Sartori says, eager to talk up a black number made from cotton jersey. “You can easily style it very dressy, or be cool with a black cashmere T-shirt and joggers.” Stepping from fashion boutiques into more traditional premium men’s shops such as the Armoury and Thom Sweeney, you will discover a similar pattern. “When we started, it was very rare,” says Thom Whiddett, who co-founded Thom Sweeney 10 years ago. “It seemed to have a stigma as being old-fashioned.” Back then, about one in 30 of their custom orders was for a DB; now it is more like one in 12. At the very least, double- breastedness is doing double the business these days.
