By Robbie Collin. Robbie is the chief film critic for The Telegraph, a PS reader and a menswear enthusiast.
On February 2nd 1660, Samuel Pepys passed the evening with half a dozen friends at Harper’s, a tavern by the King Street gate of Whitehall Palace. The main order of business – aside from gossiping about the Rump Parliament – was what Pepys called “a sport called, selling of a horse for a dish of eggs and herrings”.
Exactly what this entailed has, alas, been lost to history. Scholars believe it may have been a game of chance. But Pepys did furnish us with another intriguing detail: that before leaving the house to partake in whatever the activity was, he’d made a point of changing out of his petticoat breeches and into a white suit.
That Pepys thought he could get away with such a getup in a city where the streets literally ran with sewage seems a telling psychological detail – though perhaps it reveals no more about him back then than it does about those who wear them now.
Of all the options in the masculine wardrobe, the white suit has always been a uniquely charged one: the surprise that Pepys would risk wearing one in Restoration-era London feels connected to the tensions the outfit still tends to create wherever it’s worn, and whomever by.
What if it gets dirty? What if it’s too flashy? And even at fancier occasions, never mind the pub, won’t the wearer just stick out?
For women, white (plus its cousins cream, ivory, ecru and stone) is simple. It suggests chastity and purity, hence its association with ceremonial dress since the ancient world and with weddings since Victorian times.
But for men, it often comes loaded with a more complex suggestion that the wearer stands outside the natural order of things, from the smart blues and greys of business to the countryside’s earthier tones.
This can be seen in the way costume designers have used white suits in cinema over the years. To start with it is used to show extreme virtue, right up to God Himself – or at least the version played by Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty, sporting a stiffly pristine pastoral rig.
This idea is played on in Constantine two years later, Peter Stormare’s Lucifer opting for a strikingly similar look but with a Cuban collar shirt and bare feet. (In costume design, the devil really is in the details.)
White tailoring often suggests the wearer plays things straight, like Henry Fonda in his breezy summer flannels in 12 Angry Men, trying to reason with his steamed-up fellow jurors.
But it can equally serve as a front, someone pretending to that purity. See any of the screen Gatsbys, from Robert Redford to Leonardo DiCaprio, whose costume designers all made a point of matching F Scott Fitzgerald’s description of the “white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie” the character wore for his high-stakes reunion with his (highly status-conscious) lost love.
The wearer is making a point that they don’t quite belong to the world around them – like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, whose disco-ready polyester three-piece, with its outrageous shoulder-breadth peaked lapels, makes the New York subway look like darkest Mordor.
Elsewhere – as in the case of Josh O’Connor’s archaeologist in La Chimera, drifting through 1980s Italy in rumpled linen (shown top) – the character stands out because the world is rejecting him. That film is also an illustration of how the white suit rarely permits total existential escape: the fabric offers far too vivid a showcase for mud and blood for that. Whether warrior or wanderer, the wearer usually ends up marked.
For those of us who grew up in Britain in the 1980s and 90s, the white suit’s biggest champions were found not on film, but television.
The BBC had its celebrated war correspondent Martin Bell, for whom the white suit served as both trademark and talisman. He first wore it on camera while reporting from Yugoslavia in 1991, during the outbreak of the Ten-Day War: after making it out safe and sound, the look became his lucky charm.
Meanwhile, over on ITV in the ad breaks, there was another white-clad British gentleman abroad: The Man from Del Monte. A creation of the New York advertising agency McCann Erickson, this fruit-plantation quality-control manager was originally American, but test audiences apparently recoiled from his threatening mafioso air. The role was recast with the Lancastrian actor Brian Jackson, which shifted the vibe from criminal to colonial.
Like Bell, the suit singled him out as that classic Graham Greene archetype, the lone Englishman overseas – capable and worldly-wise, but with wisps of mystery and eroticism swirling in the mix. No wonder both were housewives’ favourites.
Perhaps the screen’s most obvious white-suited heartthrob is Sean Connery’s James Bond, whose peak lapel ivory dinner jacket worn in the opening scene of Goldfinger – initially under a wetsuit – still feels like the first and last word in Fleming-esque sophistication with a brute-force edge.
The look was revived five more times in the series, in Diamonds Are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun, Octopussy, A View to a Kill and Spectre – while Christopher Lee’s impossibly sleek assassin Francisco Scaramanga, in the second of those, also went white for his signature outfit – or rather cream, with a high, safari-shirt-like buttoning point. The script describes it as linen, but it’s visibly polyester: if one’s firearm is gold, presumably one must make savings somewhere.
It’s a clean, airy look, just right for the style-conscious chap with his own Thai island lair: it also neatly positions him as the typically dark-suited 007’s equal and opposite.
As for my own favourite white suit in the Bond canon, it’s a fairly incidental one, worn by the Jamaican MI6 bureau chief who swans out of his Kingston club only to be assassinated in the car park. It might lack the supreme elegance of those Connery-era dinner jackets, but it scores high for visual impact: its light stony fabric is a perfect canvas for a violent bullet-splash of red.
The white suit’s particular susceptibility to blood can signal the wearer has a high opinion of their own invulnerability – they want to show they’re not afraid to stand out.
Just look at Al Pacino’s wardrobe in Scarface, which features numerous variations on the theme, from a swishy double-breasted pinstripe (ideal for the pool) to a subtler beige number with low-notched lapels, and two three-piece options, including a cream wedding tuxedo.
For gangsters, the white suit is the ultimate way to visually pull rank: “I’ve more than enough wealth to clean or replace this,” it crows, with an implied threatening coda: “Not that any of you chumps would dare stain it in the first place.”
Of course, this attitude gets its comeuppance in one of the finest scenes ever put to film: the assassination of Don Fanucci in The Godfather Part II, when the young Vito Corleone, played by Robert De Niro, does away with Gastone Moschin’s gloating extortionist during the Festa di San Rocco celebrations.
So the man in the white suit is often singled out as a target – and rarely more strikingly, or inevitably, than in The Man in the White Suit. This 1951 Ealing comedy stars Alec Guinness as an unassuming chemist working in a textile mill, whose invention of a marvellous dirt-repelling cloth gets the entire sector in an uproar.
To road-test its powers, Guinness’s character has it made up into an ostentatious double-breasted two-piece with peaked lapels that stretch almost to his shoulders – putting him at odds with the industry’s graveyard-grey upper echelons, whose business models could be wrecked by this new miracle fabric.
Here the white suit is the ultimate badge of the outsider, as Guinness flees his newfound foes through the backstreets of a northern factory town, glowing bright as a beacon against the dingy cobbles and bricks.
Does that make him the great white hope of the working class, toiling joylessly over their laundry, or just a lily-white idealist whom reality has yet to besmirch? Either way, one thing is certain: when it comes to tailoring on screen, white is anything but neutral.
