The Suit I Bought for One Wedding and Wore to Sixty-Three Other Things

On the grey flannel that turned into the most versatile piece I own and what that says about buying suits.

Photo by Ali Morshedlou on Unsplash

I bought the suit for my college friend Ben’s wedding in Napa in 2018. I needed a suit, Ben’s wedding had a dress code that said “festive attire” in a way that could be interpreted in several directions and I chose “grey flannel mid-weight two-button with a notch lapel” as my interpretation because that is the suit that handles the widest range of interpretations of festive attire without committing too hard to any of them. I paid three hundred and forty dollars for it at a Sam Browne shop in lower Manhattan, had the sleeves and trousers altered by Raphael for sixty additional dollars, and wore it to Ben’s wedding feeling like I had solved the problem.

I have worn that suit sixty-three times since the wedding. I know it is sixty-three because I started keeping a rough wear count on things after the Red Kap jeans spreadsheet experiment showed me how useful it was, and the suit count has been running since early 2019. The sixty-three wears include: twelve job-adjacent professional situations, eight funerals, six weddings that were not Ben’s, four gallery openings, a book launch, two birthday dinners that turned out to be more formal than billed, the court appearance for a friend who needed a character witness (long story, resolved fine), and an indeterminate number of situations I would categorize as “needed to look like I had made a decision about getting dressed.”

The grey flannel mid-weight two-button with a notch lapel is the specific suit configuration that handles the broadest range of situations with the least friction. This is not a revolutionary observation — the versatile grey suit is one of those pieces of menswear advice that has been given so often it has become background noise — but there is a reason it keeps being given and the reason is that it is correct. The grey flannel specifically, because flannel has a surface texture that reads as casual enough for gallery openings and substantial enough for funerals, and the mid-weight because a mid-weight wool works across roughly eight months of the year in most American cities.

The suit has had one professional cleaning and one moth scare that turned out to be a different garment entirely but which caused me a genuine forty minutes of concern during which I looked at the flannel under a magnifying lens like a man who has recently understood what moths can do. It has been re-pressed by Raphael twice. The trousers had the seat let out eighteen months ago when I gained some weight, which is a standard alteration on a suit with enough seam allowance, and Raphael executed it without comment, which I appreciated.

The thing I want to say about the three-hundred-and-forty-dollar price point: it is not a low price for a suit and it is not a high price for a suit. It is the price of a suit that was made well enough to last the kind of use I have described, which is the price range you need to be in if you want the math to work over time. I have talked to a number of men about their suit-buying history and the consistent pattern is that the two-hundred-dollar suit purchased for a specific occasion and then worn twice more before something goes wrong with the construction costs more per wear than a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar suit that becomes the default suit for six years.

Marcus, a colleague who is something of an authority on the economics of clothing decisions, told me once that the single most common mistake men make with formal wear is buying to the occasion rather than to the use. “You buy for the wedding,” he said, “and you don’t buy for the sixty-three things that happen after the wedding, because you’re not thinking about them yet.” He is right, and the corrective is to buy a suit the way you buy a tool — for the range of situations it will be applied to rather than the specific situation that prompted the purchase.

The grey flannel suit is hanging in my closet right now. I am wearing it on Thursday to a client thing and probably again the following week to something else. It has been to Napa and to several courthouses and to a significant number of funerals and to more than one occasion where I was underdressed by the standards of the room and the suit covered the gap. At sixty-three wears and four hundred dollars all-in, I am at approximately six dollars and forty cents per wear. I am not done.