M&S cuts back on suits to fit ‘changing needs’

RISHI SUNAK may be trying to chivvy workers back into the office, but Marks & Spencer foresees a reluctance among its customers to give up home working.

It has been revealed that the chain now stocks suits in only 110 of its 245 clothing stores.

Wes Taylor, the director of menswear at the high-street giant, said that this reduction was a result of the company

‘Covid hit fast-forward on the trend to more casual dressing. Our smartwear is focused on smart separates’

adapting to “rapidly changing needs”. He added: “Covid hit fast-forward on the trend to more casual dressing that was already in train so our smartwear is now more focused on smart separates.”

In the first two months of lockdown, Marks & Spencer sold just 7,500 suits, down 80 per cent from the equivalent period online the year before. Last year, analysts said that spending on suits was down 89 per cent, a result of the “diminished need to wear a suit to the office”.

Marks and Spencer has a teasing habit of sprinkling among its perplexingly huge range of run-of-the-mill products the occasional item so stylish that it seems destined to become a perennial classic – only for it to vanish within a season or two. Doubtless the retailer would cite a lack of demand as the reason for the untimely disappearance of (for example) its excellent velvet jeans. And the writing may also be on the wall for men’s suits: dwindling demand, accelerated by lockdown working from home, has meant that fewer than half of M&S’S 254 branches now keep them in stock.

In the early 2000s, during the store’s heady period of self-reinvention as a brand offering designer style at high-street prices, celebs in sharp suitings were in the vanguard of its glossy advertising campaigns. Bryan Ferry, brooding in razor-sharp tailoring; Jimmy Carr, Martin Freeman and Bob Mortimer, deadpanning in a shoot by David Bailey – the look was cool, but not alarmingly edgy. There was no hint then that suits were an endangered species. But on the other side of the Atlantic, the advance of the corporate hoodie had already begun.

The tech bro style – jeans, hoodies, sneakers – that began as a counterblast to Wall Street types swiftly metamorphosed into the ubiquitous uniform of aspiring anti-conformist squintillionaires. Asked about his perennially drab garb, Mark Zuckerberg explained that he wanted to “clear my life” of extraneous decisions.

Yet reducing the daily sartorial faff to a minimum was a function once admirably fulfilled by the formal business suit, whose structured lines offered a flattering corrective for imperfect figures (a decent suit jacket would do wonders for the sloping Zuckerberg shoulders). More than that, a first grown-up suit was a rite of passage for boys becoming men, in which a smart M&S suit once played an important role.

Acknowledging a move towards “casual dressing”, Wes Taylor, the head of menswear at M&S, insisted that the company still aspired to “be the go-to for a great suit whatever the occasion”. The market will decide, but I am not convinced that suits are about to go the way of smoking jackets or fancy waistcoats, to become the exclusive preserve of eccentric dandies. Compare the final photograph of the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, exquisitely elegant at 80 in a beautiful suit, with the expensively grubby look favoured by the Silicon Valley billionaires. Working from home may be here to stay, but my hunch is that the suit will survive the challenge of the elastic waistband.

Gardens are not the usual preoccupation of the transport policy and research organisation, the RAC Foundation. But its recent report on parking policy warns of the threat posed by electric vehicles to our already endangered front gardens, concluding that “if the front garden is not going to be consigned to history, then the spotlight turns back onto the adequacy of the public charge-point network”.

Front gardens are one of the glories of British life, whose value as a sanctuary for humans and wildlife alike was poignantly emphasised during the pandemic. Yet current government policy encourages home-charging, which requires off-street parking. It is hard not to conclude that a national wasteland of hard standing is a strange way to achieve a greener future.