The Greatest Bespoke Suits In Cinema

From mid-century classics to contemporary blockbusters, Josh Sims highlights some of the most outstanding tailoring that has appeared on film.

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When Michael Caine’s character Charlie Crocker is released from prison in The Italian Job, he has one request. “Take me to my tailor,” he says.

Suits are rarely at the forefront of dress in the movies. Costume is used to express personality or certain traits, albeit almost subconsciously. The suit, in contrast, is regarded as all too anonymous: it most often semaphores convention, if not outright anonymity, and at best a certain period, as in Mad Men or Anderson & Sheppard’s suits in The Phantom Thread. Even offworld, the real suits are the space kind; business suits – such as the Hardy Amies-designed ones in 2001: A Space Odyssey – are worn by the pen-pushers.

It’s not always the case, of course: the dinner suit has become so synonymous with James Bond that it’s hard to put one on without intoning a famous line or two. Sometimes an actor just looks so good in his suit — Cary Grant as “just an advertising man” in North By North West — that he leaps from the screen and out of the way of crop dusters. (Grant’s original suit for the film was made by Kilgour, French & Stanbury of Savile Row, with additional copies cut by the actor’s Beverly Hills tailor, Quintino.) Suits can also work on screen precisely because they’re out of place, their anonymity the very point: what better for a crew of bank robbers to wear than identical black two-piece suits, as in Reservoir Dogs?