Do you still remember your first suit?
Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 12:41 pm
I was in a rather nostalgic mood yesterday. Visiting my parents at our house in Germany for a few days, I spent some time rummaging through the attic and through several wardrobes full of old, disused and stowed away clothing. My digging gained me two wonderful 1950s tweed jackets which, in their first life, belonged to my long gone grandfather and, for whatever reason, had escaped my attention during earlier raids to the attic.
What really came as an emotional flashback in time, however, was suddenly meeting again with my very first suit ever. Strangely enough, my first suit was not the almost proverbial charcoal or navy worsted, nor one of my beloved tweed suits that take a lion’s share of my current wardrobe, but a dinner jacket and trousers, bought for the ball crowning my first series of dancing lessons, some late Autumn day in the second half of the 1980s. I was lucky enough to have been introduced to bespoke suits and jackets rather early in my life, and I wore blazers and tweed jackets at a much earlier age, but this particular suit is an off-the-rack dinner jacket and trousers, bought in a provincial town in Germany, at what was then considered “the” gentleman’s outfitter there. I am proud to say that it is not only of a decent enough make, cut from a proper mid-weight black woolen cloth, but also in a sufficiently classic cut, that I would not hesitate to wear it today, were it not at least four sizes small for my now firmly middle-aged body. A one-button, shawl collar jacket, flat front trousers in an elegantly narrow cut, no dreadful 1980s oversized shoulders or other fashionable frills, just the classic item.
More than the somewhat pointless and vain satisfaction with my apparently pretty well-developed sense of style, at the age of sixteen or so, what really made me sentimental about this sudden reunion with a long-forgotten acquaintance were all the memories this reunion would conjure up: of the girl I met at the dancing lessons who went on to become my first proper girlfriend, of the smell of her perfume, of my old pals from school who went to these lessons with me, many of whom I haven’t seen since I left school for university, of the silly names we would call each other by, and the sillier games we would play back then, of my early nights out in town, …and of my father, complaining that it was a shame that, of all clothes, I shouldn’t have my dinner jacket properly made by his tailor, simply because I had thought of it so late that off-the-rack remained the only option.
It is amazing what stream of memories a simple old suit, or any other old item in your wardrobe, can get you into. My family’s house, fortunately, has ample room for storage, so I have rarely ever thrown a suit or jacket away that had at least a little bit of life left in it, and such acquisitiveness occasionally pays off, not so much because I have a huge selection of clothes at my disposal – I admitted earlier that many of these I would only fit in today if you cut me in half –, but because of the fond memories such random reunions can evoke.
My wife often calls me a “hopeless hoarder” – I felt never more content with this title!
What really came as an emotional flashback in time, however, was suddenly meeting again with my very first suit ever. Strangely enough, my first suit was not the almost proverbial charcoal or navy worsted, nor one of my beloved tweed suits that take a lion’s share of my current wardrobe, but a dinner jacket and trousers, bought for the ball crowning my first series of dancing lessons, some late Autumn day in the second half of the 1980s. I was lucky enough to have been introduced to bespoke suits and jackets rather early in my life, and I wore blazers and tweed jackets at a much earlier age, but this particular suit is an off-the-rack dinner jacket and trousers, bought in a provincial town in Germany, at what was then considered “the” gentleman’s outfitter there. I am proud to say that it is not only of a decent enough make, cut from a proper mid-weight black woolen cloth, but also in a sufficiently classic cut, that I would not hesitate to wear it today, were it not at least four sizes small for my now firmly middle-aged body. A one-button, shawl collar jacket, flat front trousers in an elegantly narrow cut, no dreadful 1980s oversized shoulders or other fashionable frills, just the classic item.
More than the somewhat pointless and vain satisfaction with my apparently pretty well-developed sense of style, at the age of sixteen or so, what really made me sentimental about this sudden reunion with a long-forgotten acquaintance were all the memories this reunion would conjure up: of the girl I met at the dancing lessons who went on to become my first proper girlfriend, of the smell of her perfume, of my old pals from school who went to these lessons with me, many of whom I haven’t seen since I left school for university, of the silly names we would call each other by, and the sillier games we would play back then, of my early nights out in town, …and of my father, complaining that it was a shame that, of all clothes, I shouldn’t have my dinner jacket properly made by his tailor, simply because I had thought of it so late that off-the-rack remained the only option.
It is amazing what stream of memories a simple old suit, or any other old item in your wardrobe, can get you into. My family’s house, fortunately, has ample room for storage, so I have rarely ever thrown a suit or jacket away that had at least a little bit of life left in it, and such acquisitiveness occasionally pays off, not so much because I have a huge selection of clothes at my disposal – I admitted earlier that many of these I would only fit in today if you cut me in half –, but because of the fond memories such random reunions can evoke.
My wife often calls me a “hopeless hoarder” – I felt never more content with this title!
). I don't remember what the label was.
When we put away childish things, their familiarity and their sometime-strong meaning for us continue to exert some power over us, so that, when we stumble upon them years later, we are brought up to remember their value. Alas, my father (an attic sentimentalist but outward pragmatist), is given to periodic bouts of 'Let's have a Blitz - and clear out the rubbish'. This, combined with the fact that I have lived in so many different places in my life, means that I am unlikely to have an actual reunion with long out-worn clothes and be delighted with the same strength of recollection that their sight and form and smell and touch evoke. But even he has left a tattered matchbox of my milk teeth, somewhere about the place. 
- well, it is a tweed suit, after all:
In fact, that very quality reminds me of this, taken of Ian Fleming at an airport, after the success of the novels - he's obviously enjoying the attention -
