Savile Row and the Sack Suit

[Guest]

In reading Richard Torregrossa's Cary Grant Style, I came across the assertion to the effect that before Cary Grant, Savile Row tailors were making sack suits. I was surprised to read this, particularly as it did not correspond to anything I had ever read about 1930s and 1940s British tailoring. Can this be correct? I can't think that the sack suit would equate to the drapy clothes shown in Apparel Arts prints of the times.

[Guest]

Cary Grant, Cary Grant, Cary Grant: he was a wonderful actor who always - well, later - just played himself, in roles made for him. Everybody knows Cary Grant and probably everybody likes Cary Grant and many people would like to be Cary Grant - all that is, except Cary Grant (I write as the Founder of The Cary Grant Can Never Die Society on www.facebook.com). Although he was meticulous about the detail of his clothes (even, according to one biographer measuring the length of collars etc), the phenomenon was very little really to do with the clothes.

By 'sack suit' do these people refer to Oxford Bags - a rather regrettable phenomenon in the same category as flares? I cannot think what else they could refer to. of course, Sr Armani is rather good at this sort of thing and probably well appreciated by a certain chat show host.
NJS

[Guest]

By 'sack suit' do these people refer to Oxford Bags - a rather regrettable phenomenon in the same category as flares? I cannot think what else they could refer to. of course, Sr Armani is rather good at this sort of thing and probably well appreciated by a certain chat show host.

No. It was a reference to the sack suit, pretty much as we know it -- the sort of shapeless thing that Brooks Brothers (used to) make. He called it by the name "sack suit" and described it as such. That's what surprised me.

[Guest]

I believe the reference to "sack" does not mean, necessarily, shapeless as we might think today. Rather, it is to contrast it with the more formal seamed coats like a frock coat or cutaway that the sack (also referred to as a "ditto" because the coat and trousers matched) was used to replace.

Of course, I am relying on my memory, which I know to be faulty. If anyone has Boyer's Eminently Suitable and Elegance, he can check there as it is my best guess for a reference. If not, try The Suit or Flusser's books for a source. I may check myself, but am not making any promises.

dopey

[Guest]

Is this, on the Yellow Earl, what you call a 'sack suit'?
NJS[imhttp://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg55/storeynicholas/IMAGE17LonsdaleHG3288934_10.jpgg][/img]

[Guest]

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Sorry got in a right pickle with imaging (too old for all this technology) Is the Yellow Earl (centre in Coke with cigar and gardenia) in a 'sack suit'?
NJS

[Guest]

Most definitely not. That is a cutaway or morning coat, In fact, if you look above the pocket flap, you can see the horizontal waist seam of which I spoke.

I don't have a good recollection of the exact time when the nomenclature came into use, but the man on thefar left might have been told he was wearing a "ditto" or a "sack suit".

[Guest]

I'm not sure that you could exactly specify Lonsdale's rig as morning dress although the coat does have a seam - it also seems to be in some patterned fabric; the coat has outside pockets with flaps, a step lapel and the self-material trousers have turnups; he's wearing a Coke and not a topper and really it looks like an elongated lounge suit of a very individual kind. I thought that you might mention the chap on the left - what a mess. If that is what a sack suit was, it was very well named and the whole subject is probably best forgotten!! However, to return to the sheep, people like the actor Clive Brook (Shanghai Express; Love in Exile and many other early Hollywood films), Valentino, Ronald Colman - all long before Arche Leach stopped turning somersaults for a living, never wore anything like a sack suit and the 1920s and 1930s London people didn't either. This photo was taken at Brooklands between 1910-1914. From the dress of the other chaps, it seems that Lonsdale's outfit was a fairly informal spectator's sporting outfit.
NJS

[Guest]

It is most definitely a cutaway. As far as I know, a morning coat is just another name for the same. As I understand it, the characteristics for a morning coat were much more fluid in the days when you wore either that or a frock coat every day (just as there are lots of variations of the lounge suit we wear today). When the morning coat became more ceremonial, or at least less common, it took on the rigidity of form natural to all ceremonial objects.


dopey

[Guest]

Lonsdale favoured this rig for day sporting events and there is another one of him - even with the cigar and gardenia and coke hat - at the races.

[Guest]

Finally got a chance to check the reference in Cary Grant Style. On page 36, Torregrossa writes that "Between WWI and WWII, when Grant was beginning his career... the majority of well-tailored Savile Row suits were nonvented. In other words, they didn't have slits. They were called sack suits, a term that aptly describes the way they fit a man's body."

While the drape suit was a 1930s fashion, I don't think anyone can say that it fit like a sack. These aren't zoot suits we're talking about. Torregrossa illustrates his point by showing a picture of a young Grant in a ventless "sack suit" -- a double-breasted suit -- which IIRC is traditionally nonvented in any case.

I don't understand -- I'd think that someone who'd researched 1930s British dressing with a certain amount of seriousness would come to different conclusions than the writer of the quote above.

[Guest]

I would question Torregrossa's derivatoin of "sack suit." Sator could confirm this, but I believe dopey is correct that a "sack suit" originally meant a matched suit with a coat not cut as a "body coat" with waist and/or blade seams, and that the term predates the interwar period. The later usage of "sack" to describe the undarted, natural-shouldered Brooks Bros. or Ivy League cut is, I believe, of post WWII vintage.

- Couch

[Guest]

A "sack suit" was synonymous with business suit in US parlance in the 1920s. It basically referred to a suit other than Formal or Morning dress. In the UK, the term employed was "lounge suit" which became famous due to Scholte and his "London lounge cut" ie a lounge suit cut in the manner of London tailors and most notably Mr. Scholte.

The term sack suit was then used in the second half of the last century once again iin America to describe a boxy suit worn by New England lobster fisherman. Just kidding, worn by New Englanders.