History of the Lounge Suit

The History of the Lounge Suit

With the release of the Shepperton and King Cole DB suits, Cathcart London explores the rich history of the lounge suit, from Victorian times through to the 1960s.

In these modern times, if you asked someone to describe a ‘lounge suit’ what would you expect them to say? Grey fleece sweatshirt with matching trousers? Elasticated waist and drawstring fastening? Some sportswear that might just be able to double up as sleepwear? A set of casual and comfortable leisurewear for watching TV or working from home?

However, in the history of menswear, the ‘lounge suit’ is a very different beast.

Before looking at the history of the lounge suit, it is worth knowing how the term is explained by modern sources. One dictionary refers to the lounge suit as simply a “business suit”, a definition that offers little or no definition. The Cambridge Dictionary offers us an advance on the previous definition: “a man's suit worn for work or on quite formal occasions during the day”.

The Oxford Dictionary claims the earliest record of the lounge suit is 1901 however, how true is this claim? This date is followed by the Gentleman’s Gazette which states: “The term lounge suit was coined in the beginning of the early 20th century. At that time, a regular suit was rather casual and so that’s what you would wear to a lounge. Obviously, things haven’t changed in the sense that lounges were considered casual yet the whole formality scale of clothes was very different. In those times, Gentlemen mostly wore frock coats, as well as morning coats, and a lounge suit was a new casual kid on the block.” Other sources describe the lounge suit as only becoming commonplace towards the end of the First World War. However, research shows that such claims are not entirely accurate. Instead, the lounge suit has a longer history.

Perhaps a good place to start is a description of the style from the Victoria and Albert Museum: “The lounge suit became popular during the 1860s because of its easy comfort. It originated from the 'lounging jacket', which was cut to fit the waist without a waist seam by means of a long dart from under the arm to the waist. By the 1870s the jacket was worn with matching waistcoat and trousers and had become popular for informal wear. In the early 20th century it replaced the frock coat and the morning coat.”

Left: An early illustration of the ‘lounging suit’ (1859).

Right: This shows the comparison between the lounge suit and more conventional outfits. The lack of a waist seam marks the lounge suit as distinct from its competitors.(1880)

The name ‘Lounging suit’ first seems to appear in the 1850s. In 1853 Samuels Brothers, a London-based manufacturer of menswear, began advertising their “seaside and country lounging suits”, which they described “ready-made and equal to bespoke”. Other advertisers listed their suits under various categories: Shooting, yachting, fishing and lounging, with lounge suits deemed suitable for garden parties. In 1859 the style, its name now shortened to ‘lounge suit’ was described by the tailors Browne & Payne, of Dublin’s Sackville Street, as being “the leading style for the present and coming seasons” and offered to make up a suit in just six hours.

The lounge suit was initially a challenge to high-society. In an era when the upper-classes wore frock-coats and top-hats, or morning suits, then dressed in white-tea for the evening, often regardless of whether they were eating in a restaurant or at home, and the customary business attire of the gentleman was a sombre black morning suit, the lounge suit was an eye-catching alternative. The short jacket – whether single or double breasted, was a convenient alternative to the long frock coat or evening tails. So too were the brightly coloured tweeds that were utilised by tailors, who brought the fabrics of the countryside to the streets of cities that were expanding into middle class suburbs.

This was truly a new world, one in which increasing numbers of working men were required to wear suits as industrial expansion and growing trade networks meant that office work became increasingly important. Between 1851 and 1911, the number of ‘white collar’ workers in the UK rose from 144,000 to 918,000 as the middle classes gained real wealth and income. And more office workers meant suit sales increased. The development of new trades and increasing wages of the industrial age, as the skilled artisan class were transformed into the engineers of the industrial age, also meant that the increased spending power of industrial workers supported the tailoring trades. In the late 19th Century tailors could expect a surge in trade whenever industry boomed; In 1898 tailors in Newcastle reported reaping the benefits of an industrial boom that meant shipyards, iron works and engineering companies were all busy fulfilling orders and offering their staff overtime.

In addition to ‘fancy’ tweeds – sourced from across the British Isles - that were favoured for ‘tourism suits’, the lounge suit was available in a range of fabrics including grey worsted flannel, Cheviot cloth, vicuna, ‘Angola’ wool (which was actually a type of Angora wool), serge and “finer materials suited for the promenade”. Patch pockets were reported to be favoured when making a suit from a wool check fabric. By the late 1890s narrow stripes were in fashion for lounge suits, as were brown and fawn cloths. In the early period, the suit was often made with a “coat and vest alike” combined with “trousers diverse” … that is to say, jacket and waistcoat in one cloth and trousers in a different colour or pattern. In the late 1890s it was reported that the three-piece suit all made from the same cloth, and referred to as ‘ditto’ suits, had fallen out of fashion with the upper classes due to the popularity of the style among the lower classes.

A lounge suit from 1897. The style was described as being of “Bohemian character” and, as such, was “especially acceptable for sporting purposes … the working man is by no means behind with his testimony that its unconventional character is quite in keeping with his idea of what form the upper clothing of the body should take; so that among all classes we find it a favourite.” (The Cutters Practical Guide to Jacket Cutting And Making - Tailor And Cutter – 1897)

The effect of large numbers of men wearing lounge suits, rather than something more formal, was noted in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1871: “Every man, after moulting his black coat and becoming encased in tweed, not only changes his spots, but to some extent his character. Much has been said and written about the moral influence of dress, but a special chapter might be seriously devoted to the effect of lounging suits and shooting pockets upon the ethical way of looking at things.” The matter of class was interjected into the arguments about lounge suits; They were a favourite of the burgeoning middle-classes who might have worn a formal black suit for work but had no need for the morning suits and evening wear that were a mark of the upper class gentlemen. One commentator wrote of the “bright and gaudy hues” worn by holidaymakers who were compared to “savages” who might “commit murder in order to possess an orange cravat.” One irritated gentleman wrote to The Times to express his feelings about the “holiday vulgarians” with the taste for “music-hall quips and jeers”.

Despite the attacks on the informality of lounge suits by traditionalists, the style continued to be popular. Despite the outrage felt by some, both against the lounge suits and those who wore them, the style had cemented itself into society, setting a template for the three piece suit. By the early 1880s there was less emphasis on the class of those wearing lounge-suits, with the style being increasingly favoured by higher echelons of British society. In 1880 the Tailor & Cutter, the UK’s leading tailoring journal, reported on the favoured style for lounge suits: four or five button front with a gently curving cutaway front, four pockets with flaps (one breast, two hip and a ticket pocket), usually made from Scottish tweed in a check pattern.

Left : A lounge suit from 1886 (Freeman's Journal - Tuesday 27 April 1886)

Right: An advertisement for lounge suits in the final days of the 19th Century (Irish Field - Saturday 26 August 1899)

There were variations from town to town. In some areas swollen seams or bound edges were favoured. In Newcastle, the favoured style was for double rows of stitching on the edges and four or five rows of stitching around the cuffs. The men of Sunderland, among whom the style was described as the “general favourite”, favoured their coats to be cutaway sharply from the third button. In Plymouth the straight front was favoured over the cutaway, with navy blue serge being the favoured fabric, in keeping with the custom of port towns. In Liverpool the favoured style was for matching, rather than contrasting, trousers. Tailors also noted that there was a tendency to favour patch pockets on tweed suits. By the end of the 1880s there was a fashion for cutting the coats of lounge suits so that they couldn’t be fastened, presumably to show off the newly favoured “fancy vests” that were often double breasted according to West End tailors. During the 1880s, the reporting began to change, with increasing references to the upper classes, and even the Prince of Wales and the King of Siam, wearing lounge suits. In the early 1890s the Earl of Dysart complained about the restrictive requirement for men to wear evening wear at the Opera, leading to discussion of whether lounge suits might be suitable wear for attendees.

Although history routinely presents the Victorian era as sombre and conservative, the reality was that young men took an interest in their clothing, adapting their favoured styles to keep up to date. As the years passed, the fashions changed and the lounge-suit changed with the whims of its wearers. Having started out as a particularly fitted style, by the end of the 1880s it was reported that tailors were easing the cut of lounge suits, being more generous in the body, and lowering the extremely higher fastening position of earlier years. Bound edges were also falling out of favour, being replaced by edge stitching. Although they were often cut with a four button front, the fashion was to wear them with only the top button done up. A decade later it was reported that young men were favouring a style that was distinct from the coats worn by the older generations, and that youngsters were increasingly choosing coats with a very cutaway front. As one journalist noted: “The young gentleman I saw was not old enough to remember that a similar garment was in vogue about a quarter of a century ago, and I was not about to tell him.” Other features that came and went by the season included rear vents, a style that returned in the final years of the 19th Century. As the century drew to a close, lounge suits were also being cut longer, with very little suppression at the waist. The cutaway front was abandoned for a new style of lounge suit, known as the single-breasted reefer coat, which featured a straight edge at the front. Reports from spring 1899 mentioned young men wearing single breasted, lounge suits with the front neatly cutaway. However, this was neither the full cutaway of the earlier suits or the square corners of the ‘reefer’ lounge suit. With its three button front, this would be the template for suits throughout the 20th Century.

Left: Early 20th Century advertisement for a lounge suit (Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News - Saturday 31 May 1902)

Right: A photograph showing a similar style.

As a new century dawned, the lounge-suit was a mainstay in men’s fashions. As one newspaper reported, “the lounge suit … is a single-breasted garment made on the severest and plainest of lines, with small lapels and a high cut opening, with two inside breast pockets (instead of one of these and the customary outside pocket for the handkerchief), and neither side slits nor one centre slit at the bottom.” By this time, the fashion was for conservative colours, such as midnight blue, and “quiet” patterns. The suit’s brightness came from a fancy waistcoat, often in a novelty cut or in bright colours and patterns.

Left: A lounge suit pattern for the new century (Tailor & Cutter - Thursday 26 June 1902)

Right: An illustration showing the new style for low-fastening jackets (Tailor & Cutter - Thursday 25 February 1904)

As the middle classes expanded, and the elite of the working classes – such as the engineers whose labours drove the industrial revolution – were increasingly able to purchase suits other than just basic work cloths, the ‘lounge suit’ became the uniform of the entire society. In 1905 one journal reported from the streets of London’s west-end that men wearing flannel lounge suits far outnumbered those wearing frock or morning coats.

In the early years of the new century, lounge suit styles began to see a change from the popular high-buttoning styles of earlier years. Instead, the lapels were rolled low to reveal the waistcoat, which remained high-fastening.

In 1907 the Tatler dedicated a page to King Edward wearing ‘easy fitting’ lounge suits, showing how he favoured the coat cut long with a high fastening four button front, complete with a breast pocket, and with a three button cuff. Writing in 1908 one journalist wrote of the King “setting the fashion” at a race meeting by wearing a lounge suit. The reality was that ordinary men had been wearing lounge suits for over fifty years and, in the words of one journalist, men spent “most of their lives” in a lounge suit. As such, the king was hardly setting a trend. That same year, the Tatler kept up the fight against the lounge suit, describing how the “dull man” had “fallen from the heights of sartorial splendour” to now be dressed in a lounge suit with trousers that “bag at the knees”. In 1909 it even made the newspapers when Winston Churchill arrived in parliament wearing a lounge suit. It was reported he had dressed in a hurry, to reach parliament for an urgent vote, and was still wearing his pyjamas beneath his suit.

Photographs showing the reality of the Edwardian lounge suit.

In 1909 a journalist from Tailor & Cutter made a survey of men in one carriage of a London Underground train. The men were described as middle-class: “They are surveyors, councillors accountants and tradesmen of various sorts … and what are they wearing?” The answer was as follows: “It is hardly necessary for us to state that they overwhelming majority are wearing lounge suits; for in nearly every crowd of Englishmen the lounge suit is the wear of quite three-fourths of them, and this crowd is no exception.” Out of 21 men, 15 were wearing lounge suits, with just one man out of the 21 wearing a waistcoat with lapels and one man wearing trousers with turn-ups. A majority of the lounge suits had a back seam which opened into a single vent and had just two exterior pockets, on the hip. A majority of the waistcoats were made from the same cloth as the rest of the suit. The report also noted an increasing number of the lounge suits having a lower button stance than in earlier years, with some being fastened on the waist. The suits were predominantly made from plain tweeds or worsteds. The rest of the descriptions give a good idea of the styles of the period: Twelve were wearing straw boaters, 6 were wearing black felt bowler hats, one was wearing a top-hat and one was wearing a flat cap. The majority of the men were wearing soft-collared shirts.

Left: An advertisement showing the lower button position of 20th Century suits (Army and Navy Gazette - 1911)

Right: A young man showing the lower buttoning position of the Edwardian era.

What the Victorians had seen as a daring challenge to formality had become the accepted manner of dress. First the frock coat was consigned to history, then the morning coat slowly began to disappear, its role being reduced just for some weddings and for a handful of formal events – the type of events very few people ever attended. Increasingly, men who wore suits for work wore what the tailoring trade called a lounge suit. They became the standard outfit for men of all classes of society, with the middle-classes having a suit for the office and maybe one for ‘best’, perhaps even an old one they could wear around the house. Working class men might wear an old lounge suit for work, accepting that it would deteriorate with the rigours of labour, but still giving them a certain level of formality, then own a ‘Sunday suit’ that was kept, in the parlance for the day, for ‘best’. Slowly but surely, the lounge suit had become the dominant garment in the world of suiting. Even ‘black lounge’, consisting of a black jacket and matching waistcoat worn with striped trousers, which had become the ‘uniform’ of the bankers of the City of London, a look which resisted the passing of time for so many years, eventually gave way and had all-but died out by the 1980s. Although tailoring journals continued to refer to the lounge suit, for the average man it was simply a suit.

Following the First World War, the lounge suit became the favoured style of suit. Slim suits, worn with either peaked or notch lapels, and single or double breasted waistcoats, were worn with narrow trousers for much of the 1920s.

Lounge Suits for Spring & Summer 1927 (West End Gazette, 1927)

In the late 1920s, then through the 1930s, styles began to change with peaked lapels becoming increasingly popular, waists being suppressed, chest and shoulders being emphasised, and trousers being worn much wider. In the late 1930s the draped chest appeared, further emphasising the chest. Fashions changed, yet the basic lounge suit style remained constant. This was now the dominant style that was seen as suitable for work and leisure. In other words, the lounge suit was no longer the challenger to formal styles.

Lounge suit from The Sartorial Gazette (1930) and an original tweed lounge suit, modelled by Savile Row tailor Alex Hills.

Left: An advertisement for a lounge suit pattern (Sartorial Gazette, 1931)

Right: A single-breasted lounge suit showing the broad shoulders and nipped waist of the 1930s suit. (Tailor & Cutter, 1939)

Of course, as styles became increasingly informal and technology offered new fabrics and weaves, the fashion industry attempted to introduce styles that might truly be described as suited to ‘lounging’. In the 1930s there were attempted to introduce knitted jackets that had the look of more formal suits but offered genuine movement. The post-war years saw similar garments arriving with manmade fabrics in loose weaves that were ideally suited to sitting around in informal settings. These were arguably the antecedents of the modern ‘lounge wear’ of elasticated waistbands and styles that combine the looks of sports and sleepwear.

Left: A knitted jacket (France 1939).

Right: A French suit from 1960 that was made from flexible manmade fabrics, designed for leisure wear around the house.

The long history of the lounge suit is perhaps best explained by the Encyclopaedia Britannica which states: “The prototype of the modern suit appeared in 1860 as the “lounge suit,” which was for informal wear and consisted of long trousers; a waistcoat, or vest (often elaborately decorated); and a short coat. The desire on the part of the middle class for gentlemanly clothes led to great conformity in men’s suits; since the 19th century men’s fashions have remained more or less static.”

The claim that the basic style has remained static is certainly accurate. As one history of costume noted that the lounge suit had “assumed all the respectability of the Victorian frock coat.” The styles of the Edwardian era were revived, to a certain extent in the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of the neo-Edwardian look. Similarly the straight cut, high-fastening, four-button lounge suit of the early 1900s was echoed in suits during the 1990s. It was all part of the cycle of fashion that saw the slimline suits of the 1920s being replicated in the 1960s, or 1930s suits mutating to create the seventies look, or even the look of the 1940s, with it loose cut double breasted suits, inspiring the suits of the 1980s. Whether three-piece or two-piece, single-breasted or double-breasted, high-fastening or buttoning at the waist, all of these looks were derived from the lounge suit as it had appeared in the mid-19th Century.

A comparison showing the lounge suits of the 1920s and the 1960s.

So, how does the lounge suit, with its long history, fit into the modern world? Maybe the final word should come from Debretts, the self-professed masters of British etiquette since the 1769, their guide ‘Addressing the Dress Code’ states: “‘Lounge suits’ is an expression that is only seen on invitations. It derives from the 19th century, when business attire was much more formal, and men wore long, knee-length jackets. A more casual suit with a short jacket, was worn at home, and called a ‘lounge suit’. This distinction no longer applies, and lounge suits are simply suits, of the sort worn in a formal business context. This dress code is used for occasions with various degrees of formality and means a suit worn with a shirt and tie. Lounge suits are worn for most business events, both daytime and evening, and for many social events such as lunches, receptions, dinners, weddings, christenings and funerals. They may be worn at dinner parties, especially when people come direct from work.”