Richard Armitage and the trouser break: A brief overview with examples

If you are new to the blog, having recently discovered Richard Armitage, and you like this kind of discussion, you might enjoy three posts from 2010: Armitage resartus, part 1 and part 2 and part 3. Posted more recently but buried under the publicity for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey are two posts on Richard Armitage’s recent jeans choices: Post-prandial and post-matutinal musings. (Yeah, I have a Latin “thing.”)

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I’m on my way to saying a lot more about the suit Mr. Armitage wore in Wellington, which has been identified as Ermenegildo Zegna. I’m not enough of an expert to be able to tell whether this was from the Couture or Su Misura collections, but I’m relatively sure it wasn’t purchased in the stores and altered. I’ve seen more than one candid of it that suggests specific hand-tailored features. If it was Su Misura, it’s likely made of a very light, specially woven wool, and it probably cost somewhere between $2,000-$4,500, depending on the fabric and the extent of modifications. It frankly does look like the most expensive piece of clothing he’s ever owned. (I looked up the Burberry jacket, and it would have been £1300 retail at the time, if he paid that; the Belstaff stuff is also pricey but not at this level.) It’s probably more than he paid for his laptop computer! I assume, however, he can take a tax write-off for some of it. And when he gets sick of it, he could donate it to charity.

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Speaking of wool. Oddly, Armitage’s worst-dressed character inevitably makes it into posts on his clothes. Here John Standring (Richard Armitage) tells Carol Bolton (Sarah Smart) that he thinks sheep jokes are funny, in episode 1 of Sparkhouse. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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And, sorry about this, but isn’t it interesting that Standring is wearing a blue check button-front shirt in the cap above? Just because we recently saw some dark checks in a cool color:

Richard Armitage, second afternoon press conference, Wellington, New Zealand, November 28, 2012. I don’t remember the source of this photo. Apologies. Let me know if you want credit.

I wonder if Carol would have been more impressed if she had known how trendy checks would be in a decade?

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Back to that picture below. This is a suit for a lifetime. I, at least, would be happy to see it again. I’m assuming that the fabric is a very, very expensive merino wool. Remember your love for sheep when you were playing John Standring, Mr. Armitage, and do not let their sacrifice have been made in vain. Please don’t abandon this item on the floor of your hotel room for even a second. Hang the jacket up each evening and brush it nicely. OK, I admit — that falls under the assumption that you will wear this outfit again, but then again we’ve seen you in more clothes in the last five days than we knew you had in your entire wardrobe. So — if you are not wearing a new suit for each premiere, I hope you were wise enough to buy several pairs of trousers, but if not, make sure they are aired and then also hung up well. Ask the hotel staff for assistance if necessary. Thank you.

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Richard Armitage poses on the red carpet, world premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, November 28, 2012, Wellington, New Zealand. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Fans who were there don’t seem to have photographed Armitage from the rear. This is totally inexplicable to me, frankly. So I’m waiting to say a whole bunch more, hoping that I’m going to get to see that jacket from behind — but if I don’t, no worries, I’ll write about it anyway. [ETA, just as I was about to post, that I’ve seen some blurry video of the back of the suit now and am much reassured that I haven’t misjudged the ensemble. More about this as soon as I can, but not till tomorrow at least. Talking about the whole series of architectural choices involved in that jacket is going to take a little bit.]

I haven’t talked so much about slacks until recently, so I thought I’d talk about one beautiful piece of this ensemble, something I got asked about the other day — a sizing essential for men that every well-dressed man and the people who care about him should be aware of: the trouser break.

Armitage doesn’t typically struggle with the trouser break. At the same time, this is a pretty perfect or near-perfect break, and it makes him look spectacular, particular when he’s posting with this stance, as if he could just lift his arms and fly off into space like Superman. Except much better dressed than Superman.

What is a trouser break?

The “break” of a trouser refers simply to the bend in the pant created by the way in which the bottom of the trouser meets (or doesn’t meet — which once seems to be popular) the shoes or ankle of the wearer’s body. More expensive men’s suit slacks are often sold unhemmed, and one of the things you need to tell a tailor when you buy them is how you want the break to look. Obviously, in a suit like the one Armitage had on the other night (aside from the spectacular fit — unparalleled in my experience of looking at pictures of him — there are other signs that it was made specifically for him, and is not an alteration, not even of a very expensive suit — unlike his Captain America / Los Angeles outfit, which was Tom Ford and looked like it had been competently altered) this is one of the questions the tailor will ask you while he’s measuring: how do you want the leg to fall?

How to answer this question?

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Here’s a diagram of some possibilities:

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There are at least four general trouser break options, and a lot of conflicting advice about when to choose them. Making this decision, like all good fashion choices, relies on the resolution of a few questions with regard to taste. In choosing his clothes, anyone should ask (at least) the following five questions, none of which is necessarily more important than the others:

• What looks best on me?
• What is in style right now?
• What do I feel most confident in?
• What is most correct for the occasion (in terms of convention / manners, given the likely weather, or what one will expected to do in the clothing)?
• For formal wear in particular: given that these clothes have particular tailoring conventions and no outfit gets everything 100 percent right, what do I want to emphasize and what do I want to disguise?

It would be ideal if the answers to all those questions were the same, but this is rarely the case, given that bodies are drastically diverse things, and we all wear clothes in context. To take an extreme example on the appropriateness level — Thornton’s heavy wool coat suited Mr. Armitage tremendously well, but he couldn’t have worn it to the premiere in Wellington no matter what. I have a long waist, and through a decade of crop- and short-waisted women’s tops, I wore stuff out of trend in most situations because I didn’t want a gap around my navel, but at the same I didn’t want to wear something that looked unbelievably unfashionable in settings where I did want to look out of step. Men suffer from having to resolve this conundrum just as much as women, and often with a much narrower range of acceptable options for fulling the requirements in any context.

To these questions I would add one issue that I personally find important: What am I accustomed to wearing? Although it militates against all of the dynamics of celebrity culture, in my opinion one should not debut an entirely new outfit at an important occasion unless it is completely unavoidable (as at one’s own wedding, where the point for many women these days is to wear an expensive item that one will never wear again oneself). Wearing unfamiliar clothing is a good way to undermine one’s confidence. The culture and discourse of the premiere, however, more or less require an entirely new outfit, particularly for women.

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Anyway, back to the break, why we care, and how to choose it.

The main reason that the break is important is that it is a sort of cutoff of a line that goes down a man’s trouser leg. Look at this very classic straight-leg trouser look, one we see in the U.S. all the time in offices and churches. I picked the tan color so you can see what I’m talking about more easily.

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In our culture, tallness is valued over shortness in men, and so the classic men’s suit (including the jacket) typically does everything it can to enhance the height of the wearer. Creases vary — it is possible to get a straight leg pant without a crease, or one with a not very pronounced crease, which Armitage has also been seen wearing — but the main reason to put it there, indeed, to press it heavily into the fabric, is in order to draw a straight line down the front of the leg in order to make it longer and straighter. The line draws the eye’s attention, and when the crease falls correctly, you say to yourself, “ooh, what a long, cool drink of water” (or something like that). The line of the crease, and thus the trouser, ends at the break — so the break controls the extent of the length of the leg that the viewer perceives.

In this sense, you’d think Mr. Armitage wouldn’t have any problem. He’s already quite tall. Does he really need clothes to make him look taller? No. But it’s also important that his clothes don’t make him look shorter. I would argue that he has two build issues that complicate achieving this goal. First, he has at least an average hip breadth and a well-developed musculature around it. His hips are not wide, but neither are they slender, and the muscles he’s built on them in years of dancing and action add layers. Legacy fans didn’t concoct the term “peaches” for nothing. Covering his rear with a jacket on top of that adds another layer of bulk over the hips that in turn expands his perceived width. Second, I’ve thought in the past, looking at him, that his waist is proportionally just a little bit longer than the average guy’s, which affects a bit how the top of the trouser should be built. These things taken together mean that the classic men’s straight-leg dress trouser without pleats, which sits a bit higher on the waist than most of what’s been in fashion the last decade or so, is really the best option for him. (And this was fans’ favorite look for Armitage as John Porter — uniform slacks.) At the same time, that’s what every man wears most of the time. Nothing about it is stylish or exciting or trendy. Indeed, they make military uniform trousers in that style because they are the most democratically neat style of men’s slacks. But when Armitage tries to dress for “exciting,” he faces the problem that the breadth of his hips and thighs cause some recent trouser styles not to look so great on him.

Consider, for example, something in trend all the way through the 1980s and 1990s: the full break, which Armani popularized and we saw a lot of musicians wearing at formal events. It made its way into a lot of wedding photos from those years, as well. Those suits as a whole took a departure from the traditional men’s suit (the British variation as seen on Savile Row), which emphasized exact fit, a lot of structuring and a quite narrow silhouette apart from the shoulders. Armani suits were roomier and less structured and had a lot more cloth in them, and the baggy break evened out the silhouette from top to bottom. Additionally, it was a forgiving style in the sense that if the pants weren’t exactly the correct length, the convention was still achieved. A half-centimeter here or there in the length of a baggy break wasn’t something anyone was going to notice. Short breaks are a lot less forgiving.

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The full break from the front.

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An even more generous variation of the full break that’s been style in recent years is called “toe to heel” by some fashionistas. You see a lot of cool young men wearing this. The back of the pant is hemmed as long as possible, to hit the shoe at the top, or near the top, of the heel of the shoe the person will wear the suit with. (Yes — it’s important to check the fit of a suit with the shoes you plan to wear with it, as they also affect the break choice. More about this in a bit.) The bottom of the pant essentially fits the shoe rather than the ankle. It may be hemmed straight across, or even be slanted slightly from front to back to achieve this fit.

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And we have seen Richard Armitage wearing this look at least twice. To wit, this in my opinion unwise choice that someone probably told him was cool and bohemian:

Richard Armitage, Five Women in Film and TV awards, December 7, 2007, London, England. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Or, somewhat more effectively, below:

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Promotional photo shoot of Richard Armitage (2008). Photo by Justin Canning. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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This is emphatically not a formal look. When it’s draped correctly, however, as in the photo above, this break can make the leg long quite long, and it is a typical feature of very roomy trousers. From this angle, this style actually looks pretty good — look at how long the line of his left leg appears along the crease, despite the bagging over the shin. However, it was telling to me that all the pictures we saw of this outfit presented him from a side or three quarters angle. If you looked at these trousers from a perspective closer to the front, they were, in my opinion, questionable, in terms of the way they bulk up his waist and upper thighs. It’s his hands in his pockets that are getting the trousers to drape properly, so we can see the crease. So, while I’m not a fan of the über-skinny look on him, neither do I think, in general, that Armitage should be wearing such generously cut slacks. He has a more slender waist than they seem to indicate.

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Promotional photo shoot of Richard Armitage (2008). Photo by Justin Canning. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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This very full break also more or less requires casual shoes because the top of the foot must be as flat as possible to keep the trouser crease sharp. In looking at this picture from the NYC premiere of Captain America, for instance, where a superficial glance made it seem like Mr. Armitage hemmed his pants with Scotch tape, I’ve been wondering if the issue was simply that he wore wingtips and not Converse. Wingtips are even more built up than regular men’s dress brogues, because they have additional layers of leather stitched onto the upper in order to create the wingtip pattern.

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Richard Armitage, New York City premiere of Captain America: The First Avenger, July 20, 2011. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Armitage — you are so good at choosing shoes. I loved those shoes! Loved the two-tones! But if these slacks were hemmed with the toe to heel break in mind, it might have caused that awful, distracting interference across the shoes. Part of the issue here is clearly that the front of the hem of the pant is caught in his shoe laces.

For a contrast, we could look at how a historical variation of the break question by examining the costume Armitage wore as Heinz Kruger in Captain America: The First Avenger. As far as I know, we never get to see the trouser break when Heinz Kruger is standing still, but the pictures I’ve seen still give a good idea:

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Richard Armitage as Heinz Kruger in a publicity photo for Captain America: The First Avenger. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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This is the “no break” situation, above. It’s a typical cut for this kind of (historic) double-breasted suit, which has a lot of bulk at the top, often padded shoulders, usually a pleat in the trouser (which is probably not optimal for Armitage, as it bulks up the thigh), and thus a lot of cloth in the calf, as we can see above. The cuff serves both to weigh down the pant and to balance out the silhouette at the bottom, so bagging above the foot is absolutely not desired and the trouser is usually cut with no slant, no break or perhaps at most the quarter break. It’s also a look that does well with relatively bulky shoes. At the same time, however, you can see in this photo exactly why a lot of men don’t care for no-break trousers. If the leg is as wide and the pant as short as this, it’s likely that the viewer will see the sock when the wearer is walking. Actually, there’s no shame in that, but it does mean the man has to be wearing matching socks in the correct color and length, and they can’t be bagging around the ankles. There are undergarments for avoiding that problem, as AgzyM discussed in a hilarious post for FanstRAvaganza 3.

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Now, in my opinion, the best trouser length that we’d seen him in until now was definitely the represented in the suite he wore to the BAFTA TV Awards in  2010, and at first I couldn’t figure out which break exactly he was wearing here. The official photos weren’t so interested in his legs.

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Richard Armitage, BAFTA TV Awards, London, England, June 6, 2010. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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From the angle above, it looked like it could either be a very short break, or else no break at all. He has ankle boots on, so he doesn’t need a break at all, as the boots covered his ankles. So if this was a “no break” situation, it was one verging on very, very trendy.

It’s a bit easier to diagnose the break here if we go over to candids. The fans in London seemed to have understood that it was just as important to photograph Mr. Armitage from the side and the rear as from the front, and I am immensely grateful to them for doing that. These were photos donated to RichardArmitageNet.com , so rather than reproducing them here I’ve excerpted them with links to their sources. If fans who took these pictures would like the excerpts removed, I will certainly comply.

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[Left: Richard Armitage, BAFTA TV Awards, London, England, June 6, 2010. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

As you can see from this perspective, the trouser hem just kisses the ankle of the boot, and it looks like there’s only a very short break at all. It would have been neat if he had in fact embraced that style — but in looking at photos of this event more closely, I ultimately decided that the break was more conservative.

[Right: Richard Armitage, BAFTA TV Awards, London, England, June 6, 2010. Source: Source]

This photo really makes the pants look like they’re exemplifying the classic medium break about which I will talk more in a minute. You can see a bit here, however, why it’s important to test one’s trousers with one’s shoes in advance. The classic men’s slant hem here would be fine with normal men’s dress brogues, but the ankle boots with the buckle in the back meant that the bottom rear hem of the pant got caught on the buckle when his legs were straight, which made the break look fuller that it actually was when he was standing straight. As an effect, this is a bit unfortunate because the buckle is the main reason to look at the shoe — it was his main additional unique style contribution to the whole outfit — so the spectator’s eye is drawn to it — but then you see that crinkled hem caught on the buckle. At the same time, if the pant were hemmed longer, to drape further over the heel, you wouldn’t see the buckle. I thought he looked great here, as long time readers all know, but I might have considered a slightly shorter hem.

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The half or medium break. The traditional choice of the British gentleman, here in wool flannel.

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The medium break, is the classic choice and the thing that anyone who isn’t sure what to do should probably go with. It’s the thing that one sees most often in pictures from the UK, and it is the neatest choice for a break that one typically sees in the U.S. on the average guy. It has neither the sort of vaguely roguish but often sloppy quality of the full break and its variations, nor the extreme severity (in historical versions) or daring (in its current inaugurations) of the short to no break, but offers its wearer a sort of classic look. Here’s an older example of Armitage in the medium break:

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Richard Armitage on the red carpet at the 2009 BAFTA TV awards, London, England. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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This break is hardly spectacular, for all its conservatism. It doesn’t really lengthen the line of his straight leg, but only his extended right leg. His left leg looks chunked off with the medium break, frankly. It’s not bad, but it’s not great. I think this happens to some extent because the leg of the pant is still so full through the calf, something that is easy to see on his left leg. I tend to think that the medium break is indeed right for Armitage, but if he wants to elongate the line of his legs, he has to go a little further.

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So, you’ve probably figured out now that the Ermenegildo Zegna look is the conservative half / medium trouser break. It’s a bit hard to see on that picture above, but here’s a slight further illustration via overexposure of how that break choice looks on Mr. Armitage.

This is a nice stance for us to diagnose what’s going  in the break, because he’s essentially standing with straight legs. The hem of the pants looks great here, as in the original photo — they look like they are exactly the correct length. One thing we see in the overexposure, however, is that the break doesn’t look quite as nice as it did in the original photo. The break is falling almost at the knee — which is surely not what the tailor intended. Part of this is due to the fact that he’s standing with slightly hyperextended knees, which means that the knee is further back in the leg of the pant than it is supposed to be, and wool pants are liable to slight stretching, so if he sat much in the outfit before he walked out, especially if he was hot or nervous or sweaty, the material might be a little looser than ideal at the knee by this point. Still, I think the pant is hemmed just a tic too long. Just a very, very little too long, in the front. But this very slight error, if it is there at all, is compensated for by the relative narrowness of the calf of the pant as a whole. Even though the break is falling not quite right, the narrowness of the lowest part of the pant means that there’s nothing there to create a bag, and so the break is not bothersome.

This picture also gives the spectator a sense of what the break does when you don’t notice it, which is really the goal. What everyone is seeing in the photo and jumping up and down over is that the hem is almost exactly the right length, so that the creases both feed perfectly into the lines of the jacket and fall perfectly down the leg to draw a beautifully vertical grid line, right straight down those long, long legs from hips to ankle. The material in the pant across the calf and shin is meager enough to keep the crease basically in shape despite any issue with the hem or the break. As a result, the hem falls at exactly the right place across the dark shoe, so that it all looks like one long line from the point of the wingtips up the leg. This is exactly what a tailor wants to achieve with a suit that fits perfectly.

The effect: the suit makes us forget about his hips. It elongates Mr. Armitage’s already long legs beautifully and elegantly and makes his body look like one long, dark, sexy column. And best of all — although some of the pictures show a few classic Armitage nervousness signals, he clearly signals in every picture I’ve seen of him that he feels good in this outfit. It’s appropriate for the occasion and the weather, and it’s effortless for him to wear it. He knows he looks good in it. And he can look back out of it at us with complete confidence, occasional delight, and even a bit of surprise.

You’ve come a long way, baby, from those ill-fitting suits I used to write about. Richard Armitage, the stylist (Ilaria Urbatini), and the tailor can all be proud of this effect.

~ by Servetus on November 30, 2012.