There exists a category of fashion books one does not expect, and which, once in hand, makes any other way of approaching clothing incomprehensible. “One Suit at a Time,” published on 22 June by Edizioni Rodolfo Namias, belongs to that category. Photographed by Enzo Dal Verme — who also wrote the text — with art direction by Pierpaolo Pitacco, the book documents the work of Suited & Booted, a London charity that helps more than 1,200 vulnerable men return to the job market each year with the help of a suit.
A suit. The single most symbolically charged object menswear has ever produced: social armour, a signal of belonging, a marker of seriousness and credibility. Suited & Booted understood this before anyone else: for a man emerging from a period of homelessness, long-term unemployment, or incarceration, arriving at a job interview in a proper suit can make the difference between an open door and a closed one. Clothing as a tool of emancipation — not decoration.
Dal Verme photographs his subjects with a dignity that is never condescension. This is not the gaze of charity looking down on its beneficiaries. It is the gaze of a portraitist who sees, in each man, a story of transformation: before the charity, after the charity, and in the fragile in-between where a new suit and polished shoes restore a posture, a different way of breathing, a different way of meeting another person’s eyes. The body changes when the clothing changes. That may be the most fundamental truth fashion can teach.
The book was previewed on 19 June at Milan’s Superstudio Più, in the middle of men’s Fashion Week — a choice of place and timing that is anything but innocent. Placing this book on the calendar of international menswear is a way of putting a question to the industry: what does it do with its own symbolic power? The same suits worth several thousand euros on the runway are here worn by men who sometimes have nothing else. The value is not the same. The effect is identical.
The project is supported by Love Therapy, the brand created by Elio Fiorucci — whose name remains associated with a certain idea of fashion as a vehicle for joy and inclusion — and by Mike Styles. All proceeds from the book’s sale go directly to the Suited & Booted charity. This is not another coffee-table book, then: it is a useful book, in the most concrete sense of the word.
In the end, “One Suit at a Time” interrogates the question of luxury better than most books that claim to do so. Luxury does not lie in the price of a suit. It lies in what a suit can open — a conversation, an opportunity, a recovered dignity. Dal Verme and Pitacco had the intelligence never to state this idea directly. They show it, portrait after portrait, with a patience and humility that make this one of the rare fashion objects truly worth returning to.
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