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One of the more meaningful lessons that getting into menswear in my adulthood has taught me, is that in the past, the suit wasn’t necessarily seen as this paragon of ultimate formality.

In fact, the origins of the suit as we know it are actually fairly casual. “Lounge suits” were a somewhat more streamlined take on the longer frock coats worn by English aristocracy in the nineteenth century, and often appeared in rougher, more rugged fabrics like tweed and in earthier colors like brown and green for countryside wear.

Today, however, a good chunk of the population seems to equate any and all tailored clothing with being “dressed up.” Such is the loss of the distinguishable middle ground that is “casual, but sharp,” as I like to put it.

Sure, if you’re wearing a dark gray or navy blue worsted wool suit with a conservatively colored dress shirt and dark oxford shoes, then yeah, I’d say things are looking pretty formal. But the visual language presented by suits made from more casual fabrics, combined with more casual garments like oxford cloth buttons downs, ties made from cotton, linen, or a knitted texture, along with shoes like derbies or loafers, all point to a put-together look that is decidedly less fancy-schmancy, historically speaking.

This leads me to the corduroy suit, which I believe is a prime example of some of the best that causal tailoring has to offer, and one that I hold in very high regard.

To me, the corduroy suit is among the most versatile, easy to style, easy to break up, and just all around brilliant garments around. For my highly autumnally-inspired wardrobe, it has become an essential piece of wear, and I’m glad to own two at the time of this writing.

A bit over a year ago, I bought a lovely vintage brown three-piece on eBay for about $50 or so, and it’s become an all-time favorite to be sure. Made by now-defunct New England clothier Anderson Little, it’s in a perfect cinnamon brown shade, with a fine-waled texture and a really decent fit for something not specifically tailored to me.

While I haven’t been able to date it with much accuracy due to Anderson Little’s many decades of operation, the somewhat flared leg and decent lapel width has led me to suspect that the suit was made sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s. And like a lot of ready-to-wear tailoring from ye olden days of America, the quality vastly exceeds many modern and more expensive options that you’d find today – if you can even find something like it, that is.

See, the space allotted for the casual suit in modern society has gotten smaller and smaller, with less and less men even owning one suit, let alone ones with varying degrees of formality.

Casual tailoring has been replaced with other forms of casual wear, and as such, most modern clothing manufacturers and mainstream brands aren’t offering this kind of stuff anymore. This has been the case for decades at this point – though with some recent exceptions that I’ll touch on later.

Three-pieces are a particularly old-fashioned look, but one that I personally celebrate. Wearing the vest transforms the look into one that’s somehow even more vintage, and sometimes, I really do just want to cosplay an old college professor from the 60s or whatever. Heck, Paul Giamatti rocks one just like mine in The Holdovers (2023) (his with a sweater vest instead of a matching suit vest, but I digress), and I absolutely love it.

It just looks so authentic! Even the slightly too-short sleeves somehow make it look even more so? To be honest, all of the costuming in this movie is brilliant, but that’s for another time.

Ditching the vest makes my brown cord suit more contemporary, or, well, as contemporary as a corduroy suit can be in today’s fashion landscape.

It works well with an oxford shirt. It works well with slightly dressier broadcloth shirts. It looks great with a sweater vest. It looks great with a wide selection of ties in my collection, or even without a tie at all.

I can rock it with derbies, cowboy boots, loafers, heck, even sneakers if I want to be a bit daring with it.

All in all, it’s one of my favorite vintage purchases to date.

But I’m not sure if it’s necessarily my favorite corduroy suit. The second one that I own and mentioned earlier certainly gives it some solid competition.

It’s an olive-green double-breasted two-piece suit from J.Crew’s Fall 2023 collection, and goddamn if it isn’t a thing of beauty to me.

Hell, I struggled for this suit.

Between around August 2023 and October of the same year, I was in-between jobs. Not a terribly long stretch in the grand scheme of things, but I live in NYC, and money doesn’t grow on traffic lights. I was in a bit of a financial pinch for a couple of months, meaning I couldn’t afford to spend needlessly on frivolous extras like new clothes.

Unfortunately for me, J.Crew was tempting me. Especially these days, most of my wardrobe is sourced secondhand and vintage, either through thrifting, eBay, or similar outlets. But there are still quite a few brands I do enjoy shopping at, and J.Crew, in the midst of something of a brand renaissance, has been hitting things out of the park these last few years.

When I first laid eyes on this suit from their Fall lineup in their Rockefeller Center retail location, I damn near started drooling.

First off, it’s green. One half of the earth-tone coin I use as an eternal reference point for half my wardrobe.

Secondly, it was corduroy, a beautiful cotton fabric that, if you can’t tell from the name of this blog post, I kinda dig.

Lastly, it was double-breasted. And if you had to know any one thing about me, let it be that I adore DB jackets and suits.

It was kind of the perfect storm, in many ways, my dream suit. Not to mention that it was in J.Crew’s more recently introduced Kenmare cut, a more relaxed, traditional fit compared to their Ludlow (which I think is among the better slim suit options, for what it’s worth).

I wasn’t able to buy the suit immediately. But time was ticking, as I knew it wouldn’t be available once the later winter collection arrived. After starting my new job in October, I scrapped for a few weeks, knowing that rent and bills were my financial priority. I’m not kidding when I say that I ate noodle cups and instant mashed potatoes for lunch for three weeks straight – it was like being back in college. But by November, I was able to snag my dream suit, just in time for my birthday, as it happened.

And it was good timing too, because the suit disappeared from J.Crew’s stores only a few short week later.

So, was it worth it?

I mean, hell yeah.

It’s not the pinnacle of modern tailoring or anything (pretty sure it’s a fully fused suit), but I love the thing, and it’s made pretty damn well for a mall brand option. I maintain that J.Crew’s tailoring options are pretty nice these days, at least on an aesthetic level, even if the nuts and bolts are hardly Savile Row.

I wore this thing all the damn time last winter, and with fall approaching, I can’t wait to break it out again.

But one final point I want to touch on during this overly gushy post about clothes that I own, is just my general appreciation for how versatile a corduroy suit can be.

See, as one of the more casual suiting options, it’s remarkably easy to break corduroy suits into separate pieces that can be styled on their own. This is a lot harder to pull off with most types of suits.

Typical worsted wools rarely allow for this type of freedom, usually resulting in an “orphaned suit jacket” look or worse.

Linen suits tend to be a bit more forgiving, but even then, they don’t always break up so perfectly.

Most cotton suits work well as suit separates; however, they can sometimes lack their own visual interest or unique flavor.

Suits made from rougher wools like tweed work exceptionally well as separates most of the time but can sometimes lean a bit too warm (though tweed is my actual #1 fabric of all time).

Which brings us to corduroy. Jackets made from this material, in my experience, lean comfortably warm, and their inherent thickness lends them some built-in structure, regardless of whether or not they feature a canvas construction.

But aesthetically, it really is a catch-all. Cord pants will always work well on their own, and in 99% of cases, so will the jacket. It’s a casual garment, and its unique texture makes it a perfect mix and match piece.

I think it looks especially great when mixed with other winter fabrics, like flannel or tweed, But it can even pair impressively well with a good pair of chinos!

When worn as a suit, I think it’s possible to dress it up ever so slightly by opting for a broadcloth type shirt and textured tie. This is by no means formal, but it’s ultra put-together. Very academic. From there, you can take whatever steps to casualize it that you please. Swap the shirt for an oxford (the best pairing, imo). Keep the textured tie (knit, wool, etc.), or ditch it entirely. Try a denim or chambray shirt.

Chilly out? Get some knitwear in the mix. Consider a sweater vest over an OCBD. Or make the knitwear your primary layer! Turtlenecks and medium-weight crew necks with some sort of texture are my go-to options here.

You can wear derbies, loafers, cowboy boots, or even sneakers, like mentioned previously.

Extra chilly out? Layer a raglan coat on top for an awesome effect.

Or a trench coat.

Or hell, even a leather trench coat!

See what I mean? There’s so much you can do with a corduroy suit, because it meshes so well with other smart casual aesthetics. And when you break up the suit, 90% of these styling options still apply.

Wearing cord trousers and a tweed sport coat? You can throw the trench on top of that. Toss on some Bean Boots and you’re golden.

All of this is to say, corduroy suits really excite me. They’re a piece of tailoring that to be perfectly honest, I think more people should own. They’re so damn versatile and I’m tired of pretending they aren’t.

So what if it’s giving Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)? Wes himself is known to wear corduroy suits, and while it’s been assigned this “quirky” aura, I think it should be a lot more normalized.

There are certainly vintage options to be found, not to mention a small resurgence in their availability in the mainstream clothing market.

If J.Crew is carrying ’em, you have no excuse! This shit is literally showing up at the mall, now. Go corduroy!