The 1930s

The best silhouette men have ever worn, and it wasn't close. Frederick Scholte, a Dutch tailor on Savile Row, cut for the Prince of Wales from 1919 until he died in 1948, and what he built is still the reference. He took the idea from a Guards greatcoat: extra cloth across the chest and shoulder blades so the jacket hangs in a soft ripple, a high roomy armhole so you can move your arm without the whole coat moving with it, and a suppressed waist underneath. It's called the drape. Anderson & Sheppard carried it forward and still cut it.

What the drape actually does is make an ordinary man look like a better-built one, and it does it without a single hard edge. No pad doing the work. That's the entire lesson of the decade.

Trousers stayed at the natural waist and were cut full through the leg, which is why photographs from the thirties read as elegant and photographs from most decades since read as dated. Double-breasted came into its own. Lapels were generous. Patterns got confident: chalk stripe, windowpane, glen check, worn together by men who understood what they were doing.

Then the Depression, which did the opposite of what you'd expect. Appearance mattered more, not less. A man who had lost everything else still had his presentation, and he knew it, and so did everybody looking at him.

Radio formality at its peak. Broadcast English became the standard men measured themselves against, and it was clipped, unhurried, and completely unbothered by the need to seem relatable.

Understatement was the register. You did not announce your circumstances, in either direction. A man who had money did not discuss it and a man who had lost it did not either, and both of those were understood as the same instinct.

The talkies had just replaced silent film, so for the first time a generation of men had a mass model of how a leading man was supposed to speak. It flattened accents upward again, the way radio had.

Dignity held under pressure, and everyone in the room knowing exactly what that cost.

This is the decade where the connection between conduct and self-respect is most visible, because so many men were maintaining it with nothing behind it. Pressed shirt, shined shoes, on time, no complaints, no explanation. Not to fool anyone. Half the neighbourhood was in the same position and everybody knew it. You did it because letting it go was the actual first step down and men could see that happening to people around them.