You have a first date on Saturday, the first in 20 years, and most of the shirts in your wardrobe were bought for a body and a job you no longer have. The collars are tight and the one good suit dates from a wedding in 2011. Confidence on Saturday will come from clothes that fit the man you are now, chosen for the evening you are actually going to have.
Fit and the Changing Male Body
A man’s body at 55 differs from his body at 35, even when the scales show the same number. Harvard Men’s Health Watch has reported that physically inactive men lose about 3% to 5% of their muscle mass per decade after 30, and the loss is usually accompanied by a gain in body fat. The decline tends to speed up after 60. Weight can stay level while the shoulders narrow and the waist widens, so a jacket that once fitted square across the shoulders now hangs loose at the top and strains at the button.
Clothes bought for that earlier shape draw attention to exactly the changes a man would prefer people not to notice. Trousers a size too small pull at the pockets, and a shirt bought for the chest he had a decade ago gapes between the buttons. Clothes cut for his present shape remove those signals, and he stops adjusting his collar every few minutes.
The shoulder is the part of a jacket that a tailor can change least, so it is the part to get right when buying. The seam should end where the shoulder ends. The waist, the sleeves and the trouser hems are all straightforward alterations, and many trousers are made with spare fabric at the back seam so that a tailor can let out the waistband by an inch or so, and a clean hem with little or no break over the shoe looks deliberate.
Rapid Judgements of Male Attire
Viewers needed no more than five seconds to rate a man more highly in a better-cut suit, according to a 2013 study in the Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management. Its 274 participants saw faceless images of a man wearing a bespoke suit in some and an off-the-peg suit in others, with the two differing only in minor details of cut. The bespoke version scored higher on confidence, success, salary and flexibility, and trustworthiness was the one rating it did not lift. An older man can get much of the same effect from alterations to clothes he already owns.
Dress Choices for Different Relationship Goals
Older men return to dating with different aims. Some hope to remarry, some want company for concerts and long dinners, and some are looking for a sugar baby.
Each aim tends to bring its own first meeting, from a quiet lunch to a gallery opening, and the clothes should suit that setting before anything else. A man dressed for the evening he expects looks settled in his clothes from the moment he arrives.
Colour and Perceived Status
Women rated men shown in red as more attractive and more sexually desirable than the same men shown in other colours across seven experiments led by the psychologist Andrew Elliot and published in 2010. The researchers linked the effect to perceived status, since women also judged the men in red as higher in rank, and the pattern held among students in the United States, England, Germany and China.
Red raised ratings of attraction and status only. Ratings of kindness and likeability were unchanged, and male participants rating the same photographs showed no colour effect at all. The women in the studies were also unaware that colour had influenced their ratings. A burgundy jumper or a deep red tie is a modest way to use the finding without dressing loudly. The fashion editor Adrian Clark has recommended fine rollneck knits as an easy way to bring colour into an otherwise muted wardrobe.
The Risk of Dressing Younger
Clark, who has worked as a fashion editor for more than three decades, wrote in The Observer in 2019 about what a man over 50 should stop wearing, starting with his own combat trousers and canvas trainers. He argued that revivals of the styles a man wore in his youth are aimed at a younger generation, and he put bucket hats, baseball caps, skinny jeans and Hawaiian shirts on his list of things to drop. In their place he recommended softly constructed blazers in casual fabrics and fine-gauge rollneck knits. For shoes, he suggested a rubber sole with a good leather upper, which gives the comfort of a trainer in a smarter shoe.
On a first date, clothes chosen to look younger draw attention to the attempt. Plain, well-made pieces that suit a man’s age leave the attention on the conversation, which is where he wants it.
Clothing and the Wearer’s Own State of Mind
A 2015 study by Michael Slepian and colleagues, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, found across five studies that a more formal clothing style increased abstract thinking. In one experiment, 54 students brought a formal outfit and a casual outfit to the laboratory, and those assigned to change into the formal set favoured big-picture processing more often. The authors explained the result through social distance, since formal clothes are associated with formal settings and a more detached way of thinking. They used a broad definition of formal, meaning less casual than a participant’s everyday clothes.
Studies of enclothed cognition have a mixed record. The original 2012 study by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky reported that people wearing a white coat described as a doctor’s coat made about half as many errors on an attention task as people in their own clothes. A preregistered replication published in 2019 did not reproduce that result. A 2023 meta-analysis of 40 studies raised concerns about the early work and found stronger evidence in studies published from 2016 onward. A well-chosen outfit may well change how a man feels, though the larger claims deserve some caution.
The Saturday Wardrobe Revisited
Back in front of that wardrobe, most of the preparation is subtraction. The shirts with tight collars can go. The 2011 suit goes to a tailor or to a charity shop, and what remains is a small set of clothes that fit the present body. A dark jacket with the waist taken in and a shirt with room at the neck will do more for a man’s composure on Saturday than an entire new wardrobe bought in a hurry. If he buys one new item, a dark jacket that fits at the shoulder is the most useful single purchase, since it can be worn over a shirt for lunch and over a rollneck for dinner.