"It's bad enough Mrs Dean having to eat one of Mrs Phipps unspeakable suppers, without being asked not to dress. Anyway, my dinner-jacket suit is about the only decent one I have. My blue suit is too shabby for words, and my brown one's as bad, and I can't dine in flannels, and I won't see my way to getting any new clothes just now."
So laments a young man who is studying law but does not have a job in Angela Thirkell’s August Rising from 1936. Notice that being asked to dress for dinner, which one would think of as a burden of formality, would be preferable to the young man. Why? Because of his 4 suits, his most formal one, his dinner-jacket or tuxedo, is in the best shape. This was the era when men mostly wore suits for public wear unless their work demanded something tougher to withstand hard wear. And here even a young man of professional parents who was not yet earning a living would own a set of suits, one only for evening wear.
While we tend to think of clothing as something only women had to think about, men had to think about it too. And men’s suits were almost never made at home because tailoring, which involved creating a stiffer inner structure, took different skills and materials than dressmaking. One reason why men bought their clothing as ready to wear or had them custom made more often than women did.
Angela Thirkell set her stories in the countryside of England and wrote interconnecting novels where characters and events appear in more than one. Her novels date from the 1930s through the 1950s. Although fashion is not central to her stories, I find her passing comments revealing of how people thought about clothing. You can find her books at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell
