Derek Guy
Yes, exactly. So first, it had a soft shoulder. It also had a hook vent. If you look at suit jackets, they typically either have side vents, which are the slits that go up the back, but a side vent means two slits toward the sides — or it had a hook vent, which means a center slit. The Brooks Brothers’ version had the center slit that was originally designed for horse riding, but they also cut into it a little bit to kind of create a hook.
The most telling part of the No. 1 Sack Suit was that it had a dartless front. If you look at British tailoring and Italian tailoring, you’ll typically see a line that runs right below the breast pocket down to about the hip pocket in England. In Naples, Italy, tailors will extend it all the way to the hem. A dart is basically a way to cut the fabric and then sew it together to create shape. English and Italian tailors will put a dart on both sides of the front, running from right about your rib cage to the pocket, and Neapolitan tailors will extend to the hem to create a curve that will hug your body a little bit more. The American sack suit doesn’t have a front dart, so the sides are a bit straighter.
The other thing I would note, and this is a little bit more obscure, is that American clothing manufacturing had always been more industrial than its European counterparts. When you construct a suit-jacket lapel, there’s the front fabric and then the back fabric. Since you can’t just have a raw fabric edge sticking out, the edge has to be folded in and then stitched together to finish that lapel. A tailor or a manufacturer will also have to stitch that down so that the lapel doesn’t curve to the wrong side.
In Europe, they’ll do that by hand, using what’s known as a pick stitch — which means you’re basically picking up layers of cloth and then pricking them through to stitch those four…
Auteur: Derek Guy
