Styling
To let the form of the suit read clearly, I kept it simple: a white cotton-poplin open-collar shirt from FRAY, and a wine-red knit tie. For shoes, since it’s a charcoal gray suit, I paired it with a black oxford — a Marini semi-brogue.
It’s a quiet, conventional combination. Adding a hat and sunglasses for the photographs is what brings you to the Secret-Service-in-a-movie reading.
1. Full Form
A jacket that builds volume from shoulder to chest, draws in at the underarm, runs a touch long, and flares around the hips — paired with a trouser that isn’t over-tapered — produces a classic silhouette.
* The wind has opened the trouser crease and made them look wider. Without wind, the trousers sit at the more measured width you can see in the photograph below.
With the wind down, the cleaner line through the trouser comes through.
The cloth — light, soft, of real quality — moves easily in any breeze.
2. Bending the Body
Sitting on a piece of driftwood and bending the torso, the depth from shoulder to chest comes through. That shoulder-to-chest depth is what makes the body read as solid.
3. The Trousers
Standard double-pleat trousers. The line through the waist and hips runs clean.
The seat is cleanly cut. With the jacket off and just the shirt on, the proportion between trouser width and shirt fullness is calibrated — the back view still reads strong.
The shoulder width and the trouser width sit in good proportion — even with the jacket off, the body reads solid.
Detail
Suit
- Bespoke suit: Sartoria Formosa
Jacket
- High gorge line
- Three-button front
- Four-button working buttonholes at the cuff
- Fully lined
- 100% wool
Trousers
- Double pleats
- Straight silhouette with a measured taper
- Button fly
- Side slit pockets
- 100% wool
- Hem width: 21 cm
Pairings
- Suit: Formosa bespoke
- White shirt: FRAY, cotton poplin, open collar
- Tie: MERORA
- Belt: Brioni
- Leather shoes: Marini semi-brogue oxfords
- Hat: Hermès
- Watch: Richard Lange, A. Lange & Söhne
In Closing
Buying the Formosa cashmere jacket pulled me into Classico Italia and Naples tailoring. Working through Naples bespoke — Panico, Kiton, and the rest — what I ended up with was another Formosa, this time a suit.
Since it’s vintage, the basic condition was fit. Beyond that, like the cashmere jacket, it has the same clean, refined line.
Living Sprezzatura
As I worked through above, this is a suit that, put on the body, carries both an extreme restraint and a masculine appeal — to the point of reading as a Secret Service protection detail.
Choosing Formosa — one of the Naples masters — twenty years ago, with far less information available than there is now, and building the kind of working relationship through which a suit like this could be made: that’s discernment, and that’s sprezzatura lived rather than performed. I find I have real respect for the previous owner on both counts.
Bespoke
Bespoke — full custom — gets you a suit fitted to your body and reflective of your preferences and intentions. The conventional move, having gone to the trouble, is to choose a cloth with character or pattern. The previous owner went with a quietly unremarkable charcoal gray instead.
I can’t know without asking him — but I’d guess this is a suit only someone with a clear, finished picture of what he wanted could have ordered.
Wearing this Formosa, I get the sense that a really fine bespoke suit can only come out of a two-way trust: the wearer understands the maker’s craft and shows that understanding, and on that foundation, communicates a clear purpose for the suit being made.
There’s a half-folklore line — that when you go to an English or Italian tailor or sarto for the first time, suits one and two won’t quite click, but somewhere around the third, the cut finds you. After this experience, I don’t think that story is entirely off.
It’s prompted me to think about how, to really enjoy bespoke, you need to know the maker, and you need the kind of knowledge that lets you build a real working relationship on top of that.
And that’s the heart of what bespoke means at root — be-spoken, spoken-for, spoken-with. The word turns on an ordinary fact about how people deal with one another, a fact that runs well beyond the matter of dressing. We use bespoke lightly, but if you sit with the word, it has the weight of an old proverb.
Shop
I bought the Formosa bespoke charcoal gray suit covered here at Artigiano ciao. For more on the shop itself, see the Formosa cashmere jacket piece.
[ The Formosa Cashmere Jacket piece ]
Artigiano ciao Official Website (in Japanese)
“Artigiano ciao” Global shipping is not supported. Come to the shop when you come to Japan.