“Spirited and well researched, The Suit: Form, Function and Style is a thoroughly informed examination of the ubiquitous garment that is a staple in every man’s life. Combining both substance and style, it provides a journey into the evolution of the suit and its cultural influence through the ages.”

“In its long history the suit has been both a symbol of adherence to mainstream authority as well as a weapon of rebellion. In this book, Breward masterfully traces the suit’s influence in modern and contemporary cultures with thorough scholarship and vivid writing. The Suit is a magical tour of the corporeal terrain of the garment that continues to intrigue us as it reflects the ever-changing economic and cultural contexts in which it is found. A triumph of scholarship and a joy to read.”

“Breward climbs into every armhole and measures every inside leg. He stops at nothing to decode the enigmas of men’s tailoring.”

“The Suit has its own spare, modernist elegance. It presents a decisively uncluttered history of menswear, cutting a clean line through eighteenth-century French military uniforms to dandies, Pasolini films and twentieth-century Italian tailoring, all the while insisting on the suit’s ‘all-pervasive influence in modern and contemporary cultures.'”

“[Breward] is knowledgeable about his subject, insightful in his analysis, and imaginative in the connections that he makes. The result is a thoughtful and at times lively riffle through the male wardrobe from Restoration England onward.”

“An attractively illustrated history unpicking the story of the gentleman’s tailored suit from its emergence in Western Europe at the end of the 17th century to its fate in the 21st century.”

“Expertly shows how the adoption of the suit was a manifestation of societal change as the great European wars of the 17th and 18th centuries morphed into the Industrial Revolution and thereon into the modern democratic world. Indeed, it would be hard to name another facet of our modern culture that has so effortlessly and variously expressed the cross-purposes of, say, Baudelaire, Le Corbusier, and Mao Zedong. The suit is the perfect signifier, and as Mr. Breward shows, it carries all the noble, artistic, economic, and perverse impulses of our culture.”

“Metropolis Summer Reading List 2016. . . . A scholarly history of sartorial style, a dialectic between peacock fashions and their renunciation.”
 

“Breward’s intelligent consideration of the suit is an antidote to all the bombastic ‘how to’ guides written by fashion journalists and bloggers whose idea of cultural context is to speed read a Wikipedia page. . . . a rich, deep, and satisfying study.”

“Breward offers a compendious account of the evolution of the suit from the gaudily decorated outfits of the Elizabethen court, through the luxury textile trade, to the genesis of something like the modern idea of well-dressed manhood (essentially, expensive understatement) in the nineteenth-century Parisian cult of the dandy. . . . When Breward ventures beyond just telling his story to speculate a little on the cultural resonances behind it, he does so with a sharp, laconic intelligence.”

“Breward’s book on the history and culture of the gentleman’s suit is a handsome, hardback volume with a generous number of large-format illustrations. . . . His is not a straightforward, object-oriented interpretation; what makes the book such a clever and rewarding read lies in how Breward assumes the position of a tailor in tackling a cultural history of the suit, as if fashioning a garment in material form. This is a book crafted by the measuring, marking, aligning, fitting and shaping of evidence. Just as the seam allowances of a bespoke suit allow its proportions to be altered to fit a body modified by the regimes and excesses of life, so Breward appreciates that cultural and material histories are also malleable, with margins that can be redrawn and reassembled.”