How would I pull off a floral suit or blazer?
Question in the title; I'm asking because one of my dreams is to pull off a floral suit or blazer, but I don't know what companies sell good quality, nor do I know how to style it. How would I do it?
9 Replies
i feel like black tie is the best way to do it
but even then a floral jacket is...rough
The best way to do it is unconventional tailoring imo, see Dries Van Noten for example
but if you want conventional Ethan's probably right, though its still gonna be hard
oh yeah dries is a good example for some more fashion takes that still reference menswaer
For a more casual rec, engineered garments makes a ton of blazers in floral prints/fabrics
Here's an example, the design is chainstitched
It's kind of difficult because most floral blazers are really, really cheaply made, because they're fast fashion - intended to be worn all of about twice. They will usually have some sort of weird styling halfway between a sport coat and a dinner jacket.
That said, sometimes they are made well, both on the sport coat side and the dinner jacket side.
There's a million things that define "made well" but I'd focus on ... probably three. I'm really spitballing here to take this with a huge grain of salt.
First, shell material. Most of these are the absolute cheapest material, ie, 100% polyester or similar. If you can find one made out of a good material, then you know someone actually put care into this and wants it to be at least seen as higher end. Often silk, or wool-silk blends, sometimes linen.
Second, a good quality jacket would match the intent. What I mean is this: a floral jacket is usually either deeply a "warm spring/summer" garment, or new-year's-eve-black-tie, so you'd expect it to be designed to match that need. For most of these, I'd expect it to be fairly light, less-structured, and to breathe well. If it's a dinner jacket, it should probably be the same, but might be on the opposite end. If you see a floral sport coat that runs hot, then the people making it probably didn't give a shit about how it was intended to be worn.
Third, detailing matching intent. See above, the part about weird dinner jacket / sport coat hybrids. You want it to be clearly one or the other. Either very clearly a dinner jacket, or very clearly a sport coat. Okay, I'll allow a jacquard ivory-adjacent jacket to be more of an "either" jacket, but mostly it should be clearly one or the other. That means matching details. True one-button vs two, having peaks/shawl vs notch (mostly), vented vs unvented, etc. You don't want an in-between-er.
Designer brands make these and slap very high price tags on them, but they're in ... honestly, very low demand, so a lot of them end up on ebay for pennies on the dollar. Something along the lines of: https://www.ebay.com/itm/175864074601
eBay
NWT $2995 Ralph Lauren Purple Label Cream 100% Silk H-Tooth Dinner ...
Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for NWT $2995 Ralph Lauren Purple Label Cream 100% Silk H-Tooth Dinner Jacket 38R at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!
You'd often search for: jacquard, brocade, floral, etc.
Thank you for going into detail about what to look for! I appreciate your advice