Spezzato: Breaking Up Suits for Casual Menswear Looks

About this video

The Gazette team explains the Italian menswear concept of ‘spezzato,’ which involves breaking up a suit by mixing the jacket and trousers from different suits. They provide six foundational tips for executing this technique successfully, including choosing less formal jacket constructions, coordinating fabrics and fits, ensuring adequate color contrast, and maintaining an overall casual aesthetic. The team also demonstrates advanced applications using three-piece suits and discusses modern interpretations of the style.

Key takeaways

• The Gazette team defines spezzato as ‘broken’ in Italian—the practice of deconstructing a suit by mixing jacket and trousers from different suits to create varied outfits from a smaller wardrobe
• The Gazette team recommends avoiding overly formal suit pieces with structured shoulders and peaked lapels, and prefers patterns like glen checks or houndstooth over chalk stripes, which read as too formal to separate
• The Gazette team advises matching fabric weight and seasonal appropriateness between pieces, keeping suit silhouettes consistent, providing sufficient color contrast between top and bottom, and using a unifying color to visually connect the separated elements
• The Gazette team argues that spezzato is an informal style at its core, and demonstrates how three-piece suits offer expanded mixing options, while cautioning that pairing suit jackets with casual trousers like jeans requires careful selection to avoid looking accidental

Episode details: published July 30, 2021 · 101K views · 18:31 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. The style guidance summarized here is the Gentleman’s Gazette team’s own teaching and opinion, presented for education; product recommendations are theirs, not ours. Summaries are written by Self Growth Videos from each video itself.

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