Whoever your favourite celebrity is, it’s likely that at some point in recent months, you’ve seen them wearing a gargantuan, David Byrne-style, oversized suit. Seemingly the outfit du jour, big suits have dominated the fashion world for the past year, with the likes of Bella Hadid and Michelle Pfeiffer readily getting suited and booted for their recent Saint Laurent campaigns. As well as making a big splash at this year’s Met Gala (with the tux-based theme ‘Tailored For You’ being the first time the ceremony has focused on menswear since 2003), big suits are now being worn on red carpets by everyone from Doechii to Rihanna, Nicole Kidman, and Ariana Grande.
Workwear is certainly having a moment. Hot on the heels of prestige office-based TV shows Severance, Succession, and Industry, we’ve seen the birth of the ‘office siren’ trend—a glamorization of workwear that, in the hangover of the pandemic, has tied in with company efforts to get workers out of their zoom sweatpants and back in the office.
This recent shift towards big suits, however, makes a marked difference from the sultry femininity of office siren. Gone are the days of cosplaying as sexy secretaries, or extras from The Devil Wears Prada, as pencil skirts, pussybows and pastel pantsuits are now nowhere to be seen in any collections from designers pushing office style.
The suits of Saint Laurent, as well as those of Schiaparelli, Loewe, and Thom Browne, feature broad masculine cuts and shoulder pads so bolstered you could score a touchdown in them. This, alongside their usual grey, pinstriped, or occasionally maroon appearance, adds a masculine air of history professors and smoking parlours. But despite their decidedly butch stylings, whether it’s on the runways or the red carpets, those donning these suits are largely women.
While gender-defying wardrobe choices are laudable in an age of crackdowns on gender nonconformity, in this case, they are marred somewhat by the trend’s origin. The reason all our celebs look like they’ve just stepped off the set of The Wolf of Wall Street is that big suits are part of a wider aesthetic, given the moniker ‘boom boom’ by trend forecaster Sean Monahan, that is defined by aggressive displays of wealth and idolization of 1980s greed — effectively ‘quiet luxury’s’ flashier, trashier cousin.
Like everything else about these suits, the ’80s inspo isn’t subtle, from the muted tones to boxy double-breasted frames. It’s no coincidence that we’re experiencing a resurgence of this silhouette, made famous by money-hungry stockbrokers, while politicians return to the ideals of Ronald Reagan and the yuppies. As we settle into President Trump’s second term in office, attitudes of greed, indulgence, dominance, and hyper-masculinity are being viewed more favourably. This is something these suits lean into, with their domineering stature and cement colouring at once projecting both gaudy excess and drab brutalism, which is what boom boom is all about. It’s Kim Kardashian posing with a Cybertruck, it’s Andrew Tate’s cigars, it’s Italian Futurism, it’s a display of absolute power.
With the economy teetering on the brink, this turn towards indulgence is perhaps one we should’ve seen coming. A fantasy of flashy exuberance is an easy refuge to take from the reality of tightening purse strings and budget cuts. A year on from our no-holds-barred brat summer, we’ve seen the return of raunch culture as well as the ‘mob wife’ aesthetic, both of which promote gauche, often aggressive, displays of excess, and have paved the way for our current obsession with LARP-ing as the one percent.
In light of this, it’s interesting that big suits have taken off with — predominantly liberal — women. This ostensibly Republican style, when worn by women, is the antithesis of both the tradwife and innocent-yet-sexually-available archetypes the right is pushing for women to follow. In fact, during much of the period Republican campaigns like to hark back on as a golden age of America, women wearing trousers was considered a form of sexually deviant cross-dressing. So when Chappell Roan dons a boxy suit, stern expression, VHS grain and corded phone on the leading promotional image of her single ‘The Giver’, is she doing Boom Boom drag?
This is complex, given that at its heart, a suit is a performance of masculinity regardless of who wears it, imbuing in its owner a sense of strength, dominance, professionalism and seriousness. For many, this results in a power play (one we saw in action when JD Vance derided President Zelenksy for not wearing a suit during his famously contentious White House visit earlier this year) that increase in size at the same rate as the the suit.
The difference for Chappell, and others like her, is that this performance is put on knowingly. There may well be hope for the big suit yet, because as this trend progresses we’re now seeing women so swamped in material they’re on the edge of tripping over, and even pairing the ensemble with clown shoes. In turning towards camp-ery, the power play of the suit becomes just that — play.
This sense of play easily draws parallels with that of the zoot suit, a similarly oversized outfit worn by Black and Mexican Americans in the first half of the 20th century. The flamboyance of the zoot suit’s broad lapels, knee-length jacket and bulbous trouser legs (which were designed for dancing), alongside the freedom of expression this allowed racial minorities, was seen as a threat to white America, and by the ‘40s, the suit had become the subject of a full-blown moral panic: deemed unpatriotic, inciting riots, and eventually banned.
Here, creating an exaggerated suit not only stripped the original of its seriousness but began to change its cultural association, from that of corporate men to jazz dancers. So while we can’t girlboss our way out of our current toxic masculinity crisis, knowing the power of an oversized suit—and wielding it carefully—could lead to a questioning of the ideals laid out by ‘boom boom’ culture, as well as a re-examination of what it means to wear tailoring.