Massimo Alba Sloop Suit

A suit is a suit because the jacket and the trousers are cut from the same cloth. Everything else about it, the formality, the occasion, the sense that you are dressed for something, comes from what that cloth happens to be. Put a suit in worsted wool and it belongs to an office whether you wanted it to or not. Put it in corduroy and the whole apparatus collapses into something else: a matched outfit with no institution standing behind it.

Ultra-fine cord is what makes that work rather than turning it into costume. Corduroy is defined by its wale, the count of ridges across an inch of cloth, and a broad wale is unmistakably rural, heavy and textured and pitched somewhere between a hunting trouser and a professor. Run the ridges close and shallow and the cloth stops announcing itself. At conversational distance you see a soft, dense fabric with a faint directional sheen where the pile catches light along its length, and it is only up close that the cord resolves at all.

The jacket is cut classically, with flap pockets and horn buttons, and the trousers are slim and straight. Neither half is doing anything clever, and that is the decision: when the cloth is the whole idea, the pattern should stay out of its way.

Almost nobody makes a suit that somebody would choose to wear on a day they were not required to. This is one. Desert is the colour that keeps it from reading as a costume out of another decade, which is the risk a corduroy suit runs and the reason most of them fail.

Corduroy runs through everything Massimo Alba does, and the Sloop is that cloth applied to the one garment that most needs rescuing from its own associations.

One hundred percent cotton in an ultra-fine corduroy, made in Italy. The jacket is classically cut with flap pockets and horn buttons; the trousers are slim through the leg with a straight opening. Sold as a two-piece on a single size. Colour: Desert.

The jacket and the trousers are sold together and take one size between them, which is worth knowing before you choose. The size is the jacket's. That is the right way round, because a shoulder is the one thing on a suit that cannot be altered afterwards and a trouser is the one thing that always can: buy for the shoulder, and have the waist and the length taken to you if they need it, which is the same order of priority any tailor would give you. Expect the trouser to run slim through the leg. Cotton corduroy has some give and relaxes at the knee and the elbow across a day of wearing, then comes back in the wash. The pile means the cloth reads slightly fuller on the body than a flat cotton of the same weight.

With the Genova in Bianco and nothing at the neck. Or split it: the jacket over the Larry crewneck with the Oceano jean, and the trousers with the Nizza and a plain shoe. A suit that only works as a suit is not worth owning, and this one does not have that problem.

Brush the pile back in one direction after wearing and hang the jacket on a shaped hanger. Wash cool and inside out or have it cleaned, and keep both halves out of a hot dryer, which is what crushes a fine wale and takes the sheen with it. Clean the two pieces together even when only one of them needs it, so that they age at the same rate. Our cotton care guidance covers the rest.

The Winch2 Trousers are corduroy cut on their own, the Baglietto Jacket is the virgin wool jacket, the Stan Cotton Trouser is the double-pleated cotton, and the Agone2 Shorts are the baby cord. Everything we carry from Massimo Alba is listed together.