How Old Hollywood Style Invented Modern Menswear

G. Bruce Boyer, a scholar of men’s style, agrees. “The thing that makes British tailoring so distinctive is its discipline,” he says. “It’s not just about the shoulder or the lapel—it’s about how the garment moves with the body. When Grant walks across the screen in North by Northwest, it’s not just that he looks good in the suit. It’s that the suit moves like it was built for him—and it was.”

Mears points out that American costume designers studied this British aesthetic closely. “Even someone like Adrian, who designed for MGM, understood the value of those details,” she says. “It wasn’t about copying English fashion wholly, but about using its language to build a new kind of American icon.”

The shape of Old Hollywood menswear

The drape-cut suit became the blueprint for the Golden Age of Hollywood. Developed on Savile Row and perfected in Los Angeles, the silhouette added volume to the upper torso and emphasized motion. “It was soft and rounded and had ease of movement,” says Mears. “It wasn’t stiff. It was still dramatic, but subtle.”

With shoulder padding, pleats and precisely placed buttons, these suits worked hard to broaden shoulders, taper waists, and extend limbs. “They just looked scrumptious,” says Mears. “So beautifully proportioned. So at ease. It was really a perfect moment in modern clothing.”

Tailors like Frederick Scholte in London, and later MGM designers as well as private shops on Rodeo Drive, crafted suits for the camera—and for what Boyer calls “projection fantasy.” But true soft tailoring? That was really perfected by the Italians.

“The Italian influence didn’t really start until about 10 years after the end of WWII. Brioni, which was at the forefront of the Italian look, didn’t start having customers outside of Italy until about 1955 or so,” says Boyer. “And it was the Italians—particularly in the south, in Naples—who perfected what we now call the unconstructed garment. They took all of the padding that the English put into a garment and they took it out. So in a way, they’re a counterbalance to one another.”