Silk used to be more commonly seen in tailoring than it is today. That’s in large part because quality silk has become so expensive, but also I think because we’re less used to seeing it around – even on bespoke customers, let alone other people.
The preconceptions people will have are of silk being delicate, shiny and perhaps effeminate. They can deal with the idea of it being used in a fabric mix (like the more common wool/silk/linen summer jackets) but a whole jacket or suit sounds rather bold. They probably imagine something like Bianca Jagger’s YSL suit below.
Silk does not have to be shiny, however, as my jacket from Sartoria Pirozzi above illustrates (review here). It can be matte or semi-matte, and often has lots of the natural character and variation that we like in materials like tweed.
Silk’s other advantages are that it is lightweight and strong. It isn’t as cool to the touch as linen, and doesn’t breathe or stretch as well as summer wools, but it holds its shape well and stands away from the body effectively, in the same way as seersucker. It also creases and recovers much better than linen.
Like mohair, which we covered recently in a similar guide, silk has had two main uses in tailoring historically: summer suits and evening wear.
Cream silk was often used for dinner jackets, and still is by many tailors. Its key advantage over cream barathea is that it isn’t as transparent in a lighter weight, plus it has a subtle lustre that can be rather distinguished. It’s nowhere near as shiny as the silk people imagine, and indeed is less shiny than mohair.
The use of silk in dinner jackets is one reason older images of dinner jackets (such as those below) sometimes show pale browns, creams, or other natural-looking colours alongside white. Until dyeing techniques improved, only silk in its natural colours was available.
Cream is also a hard colour to get silk facings in – the part you see as the lapels on a dinner jacket. The satin or grosgrain usually used for a dinner jacket is either rare or looks cheaper and shinier in cream. With a regular-silk dinner jacket, the same cream material can be used for both the body and the facings.
It’s also worth noting that the aversion to lustre in eveningwear is quite a British tradition. That taste for dark, thick wools has extended to many parts of the world through the influence of British style, but it isn’t universal or necessarily objective.
As to summer suits, silk was popular for hot-weather tailoring from the 1920s, as it draped and retained its shape better than linen, with the added advantage of a slightly luxurious look. It helped that silk was expensive, and so limited to the new rich, leisure classes.
For Alan Flusser in Dresssing the Man, “since its debut on the Riviera in the late twenties, the pure silk dupioni suit has always been the last word in summer chic” adding that its “natural glossy beauty and superior draping quality was a status symbol, an aristocratic garment made only by the prestigious custom tailors and top manufacturers”.
Again like mohair, silk also had a revival in the 1960s when new techniques made silk cheaper (the worms being farmed now) and dyeing techniques made more colours available.
I don’t think many people today would use it for the kind of jewel-toned dinner jackets that were popular in country clubs back then. Indeed in the film Something Wild, a blue silk suit like this is used as code for Jeff Daniels’s transition to a more flashy personality (below).
But a summer suit in cream or beige can be very elegant – like the one Tom Ewell wears in The Seven Year Itch (below).
Looking at the Celebrity bunch from Zegna, for example, the cream or beige (54325) would make a beautiful suit, and probably a nice jacket too. One of silk’s advantages is that it can have enough strength to work for trousers, at least if they’re a seasonal piece rather than a year-round workhorse. And the bunch has just added a set of four twills, in which there is a nice pale beige (64051).
Of course, the issue with commissioning a suit like that is that it’s hard to know exactly what it will look like when it’s made up. Expanding a swatch into an idea of a full suit is the perennial challenge of bespoke, and these days I rarely do so unless I’ve already seen an example elsewhere. And that’s less likely today silk’s expense and rarity.
Sitting somewhere between these two purposes is silk for evening wear, but not a tux. It’s the kind of purpose my mohair suit was designed for, and could be seen as a form of cocktail attire.
Quite a few brands have done these silk suits over the years, but the expense does make them rare. One maker that uses it quite a lot is Saman Amel, which makes suits peak-lapelled or double-breasted suits in black silk. The images below are of two types they use, the single-breasted a raw, slubbier variety and the double-breasted a smoother variety.
So why is silk so expensive today? It used to be a little more expensive than wool or linen, according to tailors, but not the multiples it is today.
It seems it’s mostly about shrinking supply. The vast majority of the high-end market comes from one mill, Tessitura di Novara, which is part of the Zegna group. Zegna has its own bunches, but also supplies most of the merchants that have silk in their eveningwear collections.
Silk is occasionally offered in other forms, but the Holland & Sherry bunch I used for my Pirozzi suit (shown above and top), for example, is no longer available. They do carry a couple of silks in the Black Tie book, and their interiors collection has a couple of other qualities that could be used for tailoring. But I don’t have any experience of those, and given they’re in the interiors range, I’m going to guess readers don’t either.
Among other bunches, the nicest silks are probably the Celebrity from Zegna and Festival from Scabal. Tessitura di Novara does both a half width and a full width, and the half width (Celebrity) has a nicer handle. Loro Piana carries the full width.
Pongees has some silk for tailoring, which is nice but has more shine than the others mentioned here. It’s sometimes used as an alternative to linen for dress waistcoats. Pongees and Bennett Silks are also a good source for pure-silk shirtings.
Dupioni, by the way, is a rawer, less refined silk, and so tends to have more slubbiness. The fibre itself is either mulberry silk, which is finer, naturally white and more delicate; or tussah, which is wild, cheaper and coarser. The dress options above are all mulberry, but tussah’s coarseness can make it a good option for casual styles – particularly if you like its natural brown colour (eg below, from Drake’s a few years ago).
Thank you to BAMF Style for information and research on the silk suit in film. Many thanks to Josh Byrne and Holland & Sherry for other information.
