CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The midnight blue tuxedo worn by Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe to a Broadway opening night in 2008 set off a chain of scholarly inquiry that has now produced a book arguing that the modern business suit is a direct legacy of the American and French Revolutions. Chloe Chapin, Ph.D. ’23, spent more than 20 years as a costume designer before writing “Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men.” The book zeroes in on a 75-year window between the 18th and 19th centuries.
During that span, Enlightenment ideas that fueled two revolutions also erased centuries of flamboyant men’s fashion and replaced it with the plain, dark uniform men still wear to boardrooms and funerals. Chapin noticed the shift while scrolling through her mental database of historical costumes.
Men in the 1700s did not wear black and white for formal occasions. Half a century later, they did. The change was total and permanent.
“Why did they suddenly adopt this plain uniform?” she asked in an interview published by Harvard. The stakes here are not trivial.
Chapin’s answer ties the modern suit directly to republican ideals of democracy and equality. The plain dark suit was not a fashion choice. It was a political statement.
Men rejected the silk, lace, and bright colors of aristocratic dress because those clothes signaled inherited rank and wealth. A plain suit signaled nothing about a man’s birth. It signaled only that he was a citizen, equal to other citizens.
That logic still governs what men wear to work every day. The uniform persists because the ideals it represents — equality, democracy, rejection of inherited privilege — remain central to American and French national identity.
To abandon the suit would be, in some sense, to abandon those values. That is the weight Chapin’s argument places on a garment most men put on without thinking. The book began with a casual compliment.
Chapin designed costumes for “Equus,” the Broadway play starring Radcliffe. At the opening night party, she told him she liked his midnight blue tuxedo.
Radcliffe mentioned the history of British royalty wearing midnight blue for formal occasions. Chapin found the story glamorous and fascinating. She set the idea aside for years.
It resurfaced while she researched costumes for the opera “La Traviata,” set in the 1860s. That opera’s formalwear looked nothing like the costumes of the 1700s. The shift had happened, and Chapin wanted to know why.
Her answer forces a reexamination of something so ordinary it is invisible. The dark suit is not neutral.
It is not merely practical. It is a relic of revolutionary politics, still worn by men who have no idea they are dressing in the uniform of 18th-century republicans. Chapin’s book traces the transformation of men’s fashion from the flamboyant silks of the 18th century to the modern uniform of dark suits.
That transformation did not happen by accident. It happened because men in the new American republic and revolutionary France deliberately chose to dress like equals.
They chose plainness over ornament. They chose black and white over color. They chose a uniform that said nothing about a man’s ancestry and everything about his commitment to democratic ideals.
The suit remains. The ideals remain, at least in theory. Whether modern men still believe in those ideals is a question Chapin’s book does not answer.
But it does make clear that every man who puts on a dark suit is wearing a piece of revolutionary history, whether he knows it or not.
