By Robbie Collin. Robbie is the chief movie critic for The Telegraph, a PS reader and a menswear fanatic.
On February 2nd 1660, Samuel Pepys handed the night with half a dozen buddies at Harper’s, a tavern by the King Road gate of Whitehall Palace. The principle order of enterprise – except for gossiping in regards to the Rump Parliament – was what Pepys known as “a sport known as, promoting of a horse for a dish of eggs and herrings”.
Precisely what this entailed has, alas, been misplaced to historical past. Students imagine it could have been a sport of probability. However Pepys did furnish us with one other intriguing element: that earlier than leaving the home to partake in regardless of the exercise was, he’d made a degree of adjusting out of his petticoat breeches and right into a white go well with.
That Pepys thought he may get away with such a getup in a metropolis the place the streets actually ran with sewage appears a telling psychological element – although maybe it reveals no extra about him again then than it does about those that put on them now.
Of all of the choices within the masculine wardrobe, the white go well with has all the time been a uniquely charged one: the shock that Pepys would danger carrying one in Restoration-era London feels related to the tensions the outfit nonetheless tends to create wherever it’s worn, and whomever by.
What if it will get soiled? What if it’s too flashy? And even at fancier events, by no means thoughts the pub, gained’t the wearer simply stick out?
For girls, white (plus its cousins cream, ivory, ecru and stone) is easy. It suggests chastity and purity, therefore its affiliation with ceremonial gown because the historic world and with weddings since Victorian instances.
However for males, it usually comes loaded with a extra advanced suggestion that the wearer stands outdoors the pure order of issues, from the sensible blues and greys of enterprise to the countryside’s earthier tones.
This may be seen in the best way costume designers have used white fits in cinema through the years. To begin with it’s used to point out excessive advantage, proper as much as God Himself – or not less than the model performed by Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty, sporting a stiffly pristine pastoral rig.
This concept is performed on in Constantine two years later, Peter Stormare’s Lucifer choosing a strikingly comparable look however with a Cuban collar shirt and naked toes. (In costume design, the satan actually is within the particulars.)
White tailoring usually suggests the wearer performs issues straight, like Henry Fonda in his breezy summer season flannels in 12 Indignant Males, making an attempt to motive along with his steamed-up fellow jurors.
However it may well equally function a entrance, somebody pretending to that purity. See any of the display screen Gatsbys, from Robert Redford to Leonardo DiCaprio, whose costume designers all made a degree of matching F Scott Fitzgerald’s description of the “white flannel go well with, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie” the character wore for his high-stakes reunion along with his (extremely status-conscious) misplaced love.
The wearer is making a degree that they don’t fairly belong to the world round them – like John Travolta in Saturday Evening Fever, whose disco-ready polyester three-piece, with its outrageous shoulder-breadth peaked lapels, makes the New York subway seem like darkest Mordor.
Elsewhere – as within the case of Josh O’Connor’s archaeologist in La Chimera, drifting by way of Eighties Italy in rumpled linen (proven prime) – the character stands out as a result of the world is rejecting him. That movie can be an illustration of how the white go well with not often permits complete existential escape: the material presents far too vivid a showcase for mud and blood for that. Whether or not warrior or wanderer, the wearer often finally ends up marked.
For these of us who grew up in Britain within the Eighties and 90s, the white go well with’s largest champions have been discovered not on movie, however tv.
The BBC had its celebrated warfare correspondent Martin Bell, for whom the white go well with served as each trademark and talisman. He first wore it on digicam whereas reporting from Yugoslavia in 1991, through the outbreak of the Ten-Day Warfare: after making it out secure and sound, the look grew to become his fortunate allure.
In the meantime, over on ITV within the advert breaks, there was one other white-clad British gentleman overseas: The Man from Del Monte. A creation of the New York promoting company McCann Erickson, this fruit-plantation quality-control supervisor was initially American, however check audiences apparently recoiled from his threatening mafioso air. The function was recast with the Lancastrian actor Brian Jackson, which shifted the vibe from legal to colonial.
Like Bell, the go well with singled him out as that traditional Graham Greene archetype, the lone Englishman abroad – succesful and worldly-wise, however with wisps of thriller and eroticism swirling within the combine. No surprise each have been housewives’ favourites.
Maybe the display screen’s most evident white-suited heartthrob is Sean Connery’s James Bond, whose peak lapel ivory dinner jacket worn within the opening scene of Goldfinger – initially beneath a wetsuit – nonetheless appears like the primary and final phrase in Fleming-esque sophistication with a brute-force edge.
The look was revived 5 extra instances within the sequence, in Diamonds Are Without end, The Man with the Golden Gun, Octopussy, A View to a Kill and Spectre – whereas Christopher Lee’s impossibly modern murderer Francisco Scaramanga, within the second of these, additionally went white for his signature outfit – or reasonably cream, with a excessive, safari-shirt-like buttoning level. The script describes it as linen, nevertheless it’s visibly polyester: if one’s firearm is gold, presumably one should make financial savings someplace.
It’s a clear, ethereal look, excellent for the style-conscious chap along with his personal Thai island lair: it additionally neatly positions him because the usually dark-suited 007’s equal and reverse.
As for my very own favorite white go well with within the Bond canon, it’s a reasonably incidental one, worn by the Jamaican MI6 bureau chief who swans out of his Kingston membership solely to be assassinated within the automobile park. It’d lack the supreme class of these Connery-era dinner jackets, nevertheless it scores excessive for visible affect: its mild stony cloth is an ideal canvas for a violent bullet-splash of crimson.
The white go well with’s specific susceptibility to blood can sign the wearer has a excessive opinion of their very own invulnerability – they need to present they’re not afraid to face out.
Simply have a look at Al Pacino’s wardrobe in Scarface, which options quite a few variations on the theme, from a swishy double-breasted pinstripe (excellent for the pool) to a subtler beige quantity with low-notched lapels, and two three-piece choices, together with a cream wedding ceremony tuxedo.
For gangsters, the white go well with is the final word solution to visually pull rank: “I’ve greater than sufficient wealth to wash or change this,” it crows, with an implied threatening coda: “Not that any of you chumps would dare stain it within the first place.”
In fact, this angle will get its comeuppance in one of many best scenes ever put to movie: the assassination of Don Fanucci in The Godfather Half II, when the younger Vito Corleone, performed by Robert De Niro, does away with Gastone Moschin’s gloating extortionist through the Festa di San Rocco celebrations.
So the person within the white go well with is usually singled out as a goal – and barely extra strikingly, or inevitably, than in The Man within the White Swimsuit. This 1951 Ealing comedy stars Alec Guinness as an unassuming chemist working in a textile mill, whose invention of a marvellous dirt-repelling material will get the complete sector in an uproar.
To road-test its powers, Guinness’s character has it made up into an ostentatious double-breasted two-piece with peaked lapels that stretch virtually to his shoulders – placing him at odds with the business’s graveyard-grey higher echelons, whose enterprise fashions may very well be wrecked by this new miracle cloth.
Right here the white go well with is the final word badge of the outsider, as Guinness flees his newfound foes by way of the backstreets of a northern manufacturing facility city, glowing shiny as a beacon towards the dingy cobbles and bricks.
Does that make him the nice white hope of the working class, toiling joylessly over their laundry, or only a lily-white idealist whom actuality has but to besmirch? Both means, one factor is for certain: on the subject of tailoring on display screen, white is something however impartial.
