Style icons26 July 20263 min read
The Tom Ripley suit: Italian tailoring of the sixties.
Filmed in black and white, a suit can no longer cheat: what remains is cut, drape and cloth. What the Ripley series shows of Italian tailoring, and what a wardrobe can keep from it.
By Gilles Masson, Atelier Mesure, Paris 7ᵉ
A small-time crook lands on the Amalfi coast and leaves it an elegant man. Tom Ripley's story is first of all a story of clothes: every step of his rise passes through a wardrobe better cut than the last. The 2024 series adds a constraint that changes everything: black and white. Deprived of colour, a suit can only persuade through its construction.
The garment comes before the man
Ripley does not learn to become someone else: he learns to dress like him. The story is amoral; the sartorial lesson is not. A well-judged suit changes the way you stand, the way you walk, the way you are received. It is not a disguise, it is a posture.
It is also the difference between wearing a garment and being worn by it. A borrowed suit floats or pinches, and everyone sees it before knowing why. A made-to-measure suit settles the question once and for all: it is built on the body it dresses, and the silhouette speaks before you do.
What black and white reveals
Without colour, a cloth exists only through its texture. Flannel absorbs the light, mohair throws it back, linen breaks into sharp creases. The whole series rests on those contrasts: its suits are living surfaces, never flat panels.
It is an excellent test for choosing cloth today: imagine the photograph in black and white. If the garment holds up only through its colour, the cloth is poor. Choosing a suiting starts with hand and drape; the shade comes after.
The soft shoulder, the line of the sixties
The Italian tailoring of those years rests on a lightly built shoulder, a moderate lapel and a trouser worn at the waist. Nothing tight, nothing floating: a clean line that follows the body without moulding it.
That silhouette is precisely the one 2026 is bringing back under the name of soft tailoring. It demands a light construction, whose ease comes from the canvas rather than from an absence of structure, and a trouser whose rise is set to the body, not to fashion.
« Better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. »
Key points
The Ripley lesson, in seven points.
- The silhouette speaks before you do: the cut is the first message
- Judge a cloth as if in black and white: texture first, colour after
- Flannel absorbs the light, mohair throws it back
- The Italian shoulder of the sixties is soft, never empty
- A moderate lapel crosses the decades without dating
- The trouser sits at the true waist, as it did then
- Real ease is built, never improvised
You can keep nothing of the character and everything of his wardrobe: few pieces, living cloths, a constant line. That is the definition of a built wardrobe, the one detailed in the made-to-measure suit guide.
