Derek Guy showcases Giacometti and peers in mid-century tailored workwear

Derek Guy pushed a simple, stubborn idea into view: mid-century artists wore tailoring the way tradespeople wore jackets, and the visual evidence is blunt. Guy shared historical photos that place Alberto Giacometti in padded suits and other creatives in hunting coats, framing a theme of blending tailoring and utility in professional attire.

Alberto Giacometti, the notes point out, was one of the few artists in 1950s Paris who still wore tailored clothing, even when he was elbow deep in clay. He often had some kind of neckwear, if not a tie then at least a jauntily knotted small scarf, and his biographer James Lord said he wore, in Lord’s words, "the clothing of male respectability" that was nevertheless "loosely cut, beaten up and never too pressed or polished." Lord wrote, "Alberto’s apparel was so much a part of his personality as to seem almost a state of mind rather than an outfit of clothes," an image that reads less like costume and more like working uniform. Image credit for the Giacometti shot is given as Paul Almasy/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.

Georges Braque shows the same collision of practical and tailored. The German art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler remembered Braque thus: "He used to wear very simple blue suits, of a wholly distinctive cut, the like of which I’ve never seen," and those suits were described as a cross-breed between French workwear and British tailoring, constructed from utilitarian materials with no underlying structure so they draped like the bleu de travails that French labourers wore in factories. The framing is explicit: Braque purloined utilitarian pieces and turned them into creative expression. The Braque image is credited to Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

TheArtNewspaper’s visual roundup that Guy walked through pulls a wider cast: a group image labeled left to right as David Hockney, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Duncan Hannah. That lineup sits beside Guy’s other finds and the original report’s language noting "mid-century artists like Giacometti in padded suits and others in workwear like hunting coats," consolidating the idea that artists mixed hunting coats, padded tailoring and soft-worn suiting as practical, professional dress.

Guy comes to this as a practiced commentator: TheArtNewspaper identifies him as the fashion writer "perhaps best known for his pithy menswear observations and advice, dolled out via X." He also authored a Drake’s piece dated Oct 21, 2022, titled "A Suit for the Season: Derek Guy on Drake's Flannel Tailoring." There he wrote, "I like navy wool-mohair single-breasted suits with peak lapels," and observed, "Flannel is pretty casual." Drake's flannel suits, Guy noted in the product description, use 11oz woolen flannel, lighter than the standard 13/14oz, are half-canvassed with haircloth from shoulder to ribcage to shape the chest, and carry a soft shoulder, gently waisted silhouette and mid-rise straight-legged trousers for Drake's slightly more relaxed house style, adaptable to temperate climates and three-season wear.

A separate tailoring discussion recorded in a YouTube transcript broadened the technical frame: speakers contrasted house styles and silhouettes from names including Yoji Yamamoto, Arrow's Board Racer, Taylor Stitch with Golden Bear, and referenced archetypes like double riders and cafe racers. The conversation landed on fit as a literal constraint, "if a jacket is a 34 and the pants are a 28 and you're a size 44 and 36, you don't fit in the clothes. >> You're not going to look the same."

Taken together, Guy’s curation, the archival images of Giacometti and Braque, and Guy’s own technical notes on Drake's flannel make a clear point: the aesthetic line between a carved, half-canvassed suit and a rubbed-in work jacket is thinner than menswear clerks want to admit, and that hybrid has been in play since at least 1950s Paris.