Brace yourself for suspenders... Gordon Gekko style

By Josh Sims, FT.com site fashion & style article
Published: Dec 14, 2007 by Financial Times

Albert Thurston, specialist manufacturer of braces - or suspenders, as they are known in the US - has had to re-order a certain white fabric three times already this year. When Daniel Craig's James Bond appeared at the poker table in Casino Royale attired in black tie with braces - not a belt - suddenly consumer interest went through the roof. Thurston has been here before: when the company supplied Michael Douglas' red braces for 1987's Wall Street, orders doubled over the following months (see below).

Significantly, however, these days it's not just Bond-fans clamouring for the accessory. Last season Yohji Yamamoto and Armani showed braces on their catwalks, while this season Sonia Rykiel, Moschino, Neil Barrett and Alexander McQueen joined their number. The vogue for suspender braces may seem strange: they are more fiddly to put on than the simple belt and are regarded by some as rather flashy and, by others, old-fashioned. Besides, the product has barely evolved since the Y-shape arrangement across the back was adopted during the 1850s (it replaced the X-back, which itself replaced the H-back).

"Our bestsellers are woven in woollen box cloth, the use of which dates to Victorian times," admits Richard Kew, consultant managing director of Albert Thurston, which was established in 1820. "The basic design has hardly changed at all." "To some, braces can look archaic or too much of a statement, as, increasingly, ties or cufflinks are, in the same quarters," says Chris Modoo, head of buying for London tailor Ede & Ravenscroft. "Many people also associate braces either with that Chas 'n' Dave/Little House on the Prairie working man's look, 1980s yuppiedom and a return to conservatism, or a Clockwork Orange Droog-style football hooliganism, none of which are especially positive images."

Still, the skinhead style of the late 1960s and early 1970s, before it was diluted by associations with violence and racism, was one of the strongest UK working-class youth sub-cultures, its members recognisable by a dress code involving three-quarter-inch-wide and often colour-coded braces worn distinctly casually, with button-down shirts and denims. More recently, Levi's Vintage, Hackett and Margaret Howell have designed jeans, chinos and casual trousers with brace buttons.

"It's the kind of traditional detail I love," says Margaret Howell, "but I suppose it's largely defunct now. Braces have somehow become associated with older men or with a time when they were required because clothes were not so well fitting. But braces are lovely objects - the leathers, the colours and the richness of the fabrics - and as an accessory, they are a good means of self-expression. The trick is to find a way of wearing them in a modern way and not to look too Hovis advertisement about it."

Indeed, ornate braces were once a staple of men's dress. Their invention is attributed to the French, who from revolutionary times wore bretelles - strips of ribbon fixed into trouser buttonholes. In the US they have a distinguished history, too: Benjamin Franklin popularised what were called "gallowses" from 1736, and in 1871 one of the first patents for braces was issued to a Samuel Clemens, better known now as Mark Twain. The first patent for metal clip-on braces was issued in 1894 and it took until 1990 for a non-slip clip for braces to be patented by Holdup Suspender Company.

Such was the belief that braces were an essential part of the well-dressed man's attire that when war with Germany was declared in 1939, the actor Ralph Richardson rushed straight to his tailors to buy six pairs of Thurston braces lest fabric rationing leave them in short supply. All of which leads to the question of why they are now having a resurgence in the fashion world. "Braces are more comfortable than a belt for one thing," says Kew. "But more than that, as Oscar Wilde noted, clothes should hang from the shoulder and not from the waist. Using some kind of garrotte technique to cinch your trousers so they cling from the waist is clearly not going to allow your trousers to hang better, to break over your shoes more neatly, for the pleats to open. Trousers just don't look as good with a belt as they do with braces."

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Power, sex, suspenders and suits

Last Tuesday, as Merrill Lynch bankers in their shirt sleeves, braces and slanted tie clips braced for the introduction of John Thain's new senior management culture, they could have been forgiven if they paused for a second - not so much to mourn the passing of their old ways as to observe a historical moment, writes Colin Cameron.

December 11, after all, marked 20 years since Gordon Gekko - speaking into a brick-sized mobile phone on his private Hamptons beach in full-length, white towelling robe - declared in the film Wall Street that lunch was for wimps, greed was good and money never slept.

Nick Wheeler, founder of the shirt makers Charles Tyrwhitt, says the film transformed the way an industry dressed, bringing styles that were "big, bold and brash", not just to Wall Street the business area, but to the whole financial world. Indeed, the 42-year-old confesses that at the time Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, was a "sort of personal anti-hero".

But for all the late 1980s appetite for the double-breasted pinstripe suits, slanted tie clips, thick, bright braces, Windsor knots and cutaway collars showcased by Douglas, the film's impact was not uniform. In the view of London bespoke tailor Timothy Everest, 46, some of the money market's older generations, who had been through busts as well as booms, were repelled by the film's flamboyant styles.

Savile Row's Richard Anderson adds that for some of his clients in both London and New York, a reluctance to wear anything Gekko-esque has prevailed for the last two decades. But, asks Anderson, isn't 20 years a long enough exile for the pinstripe?   According to Ellen Mirojnick, the film's costume designer and the woman who inspired New York tailor Alan Flusser to create Gekko's signature look, colleagues at the time couldn't understand why she took on a movie about men in suits. The answer, she says, is that the film was really about money, power and sex and, "What's better than that?"

Mirojnick maintains that clothes were what made the main character: the effect was classic English, cut with a bit of Hollywood and a dash of Italian, jackets with double vents, classy suspenders, side tabs that hit the hips perfectly and trousers that let the legs drape, with turn-ups and a depth of pleat.

"We needed to create an illusion of what Wall Street actually represented then: the self-made operator, his own man, who moved easily and elegantly like Gene Kelly in a musical," he says. Even if today's recreation of the Wall Street attitude is relatively less exuberant, Timothy Everest believes the "Gekko mentality" has returned - the confidence to break established dress code rules, a belief in the invincibility of money and the desire to be seen as a pioneer.  It can't, after all, be a coincidence that Douglas is reprising his Oscar-winning role in a Wall Street sequel that started production this year. Its working title? Money Never Sleeps.

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