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Buying A Suit As A Middle Aged Man - Style & Color Tips - Fashion Tips For Forty Something
Men
Hi! I'm Antonio Centeno, the founder of Real Men Real Style. Today, we're going to be giving
advice to a middle-aged man on how to buy a suit.
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I'm going to link you to an article which is going to expand on suits and I'll try to
keep the advice here to be pretty much timeless and applicable to different body types.
All right, so this is the question that came in. "Antonio, I'm a 45-year-old man, 5'9",
and 185 lbs. I typically wear a 44-short jacket. I'm wondering what style jacket is best for
my body weight and height. Can you go ahead and give me a little bit more advice and I
want to make sure that I'm buying the actual right style and the right type."
Okay, so a pretty quick question and it's a pretty easy answer. I could give you the
exact, specific answer, but I want to go through the logic of how I would choose this jacket.
The first thing that was missing from this and what I would ask a man who's, let's say
-- and this gentleman's 45 years old, so he's at probably the height of his professional
career. You've got 20 to 30 years of work time in front of you. You've already got possibly
20 years of experience, so this is the point which many consider to be kind of like the
highlight of a man's working career. You've got enough energy to go off and start a company,
but at the same time, you've got enough experience to know which companies not to start.
So with this in mind, the first thing I would ask this gentleman is what is his career because
if this is a gentleman that's in the creative field, I know I'm going to have a lot more
play versus if this gentleman's in finance or banking, which is technically a lot more
conservative. Is he a lawyer and is he getting up in front of a judge and a jury, or is he
a master plumber and he rarely ever throws on a suit except for being in important events?
So that would be my first question, and so I can't give him a great answer, one specific
to him without knowing that.
The other thing I'm going to be looking at is I want to look at where he carries his
weight, so he's 5'9", 185 pounds, so he's about my size, a little bit heavier and I'm
wondering, okay, is this guy in great shape? Is most of his weight up here in the chest?
Is he really muscular or is he carrying it, and most men do, in the midsection? A little
bit of a gut, nothing scary, nothing that's going to get a whole lot of people -- nothing
that's going to get you kicked off from an airline flight, but enough that he's a bit
conscious about it because he remembers his body, how it was when he was 18.
So taking those two things in consideration, I'm going to go ahead and go out on a ledge
and I'm going to believe that he's in a professional career, that this isn't his only suit, that
he wears one fairly often, and the other thing is that he 's carrying the weight in and around
the gut. So I'm going to recommend that probably the style for him is going to be two buttons
and I'm going to go with two buttons because I want a little bit of a deeper V here. I
want to elongate -- apparently make the chest look a little bit longer, so this is going
to be good. It allows you to have a little bit of a stomach, but still conceal it just
a bit.
When it comes to the sleeves, I'm going to go with probably regular sleeves. He doesn’t
want to slim these up. Slimmer sleeves are for younger men, so he'll want to keep the
sleeves. Don't go for a slim cut jacket or anything like that. The lapels, go for probably
regular classic notch lapels. He doesn’t need to be going for peak lapels or anything
like that, which is a bit fashion forward.
Let's talk about the vents on the jacket. I've done an entire video on vents, but in
this case, I'm going to recommend the double vent for this gentleman. It sounds like he
doesn’t have enough weight that he has to worry about having a bubble butt of basically
the back of those vents protruding out, kind of like a duck tail. On the other hand, he
doesn’t want to go with the no vent because he sounds like he's got a little bit of weight
in the midsection. He wants to probably be able to put his hands in his pockets and not
have to worry about that.
So we've talked about the buttons. We've talked about the sleeves. We've talked about the
lapels. We've talked about the vents. I would say the pockets, now, if he's buying off the
rack, he's probably not going to have a whole lot of options here, but he'll want to go
with classic pockets. He's not going to want to go with anything but a ticket pocket. A
ticket pocket is just going to draw a bit more attention to that midsection, so he'll
want to go with no ticket pocket.
We've talked about all this style, and then let's talk about the fabrics. The fabrics,
I'm going to say darker fabrics because he's wearing a suit and he wants to get the most
miles out of it, but besides the charcoal, besides the navy blue, this is going to -- I
would have to probably see his hair color.
Let's say he's starting to grey just a bit. In that case, maybe all those black suits,
he should move towards greys, charcoal greys, and those are going to better balance with
his hair. They're still going to be formal, but those greys are just going to help to
better balance it. There's not going to be as much of a stark of a contrast and it's
actually going to hide the grey in his hair just a bit better because it's going to look
more uniform.
It's kind of like if you have yellow teeth and you hold up a white sheet to it, you will
see that you have really yellow teeth. Now, if you have grey hair and you hold up a black
or really dark navy to that, you're going to be able to spot the greys a lot easier.
In that case, that's why he would want to go with charcoal grey, grey, and maybe even
some medium grey for the summer.
All right, so that's my bit of advice for this gentleman when he wants to look at the
styles of the suits and the jackets. Sorry, I didn’t talk about trousers. I would say
maybe a single pleat. That would be kind of best of both worlds. I like double pleats.
I know a lot of people don't, but for a gentleman who's middle-aged, double pleats work great.
Just keep them closed. Make sure they're tapered fine, flat fronts. When you're starting to
get that little bit of a stomach, it's going to be harder to wear those.
Okay. I'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.