The Layers of Meaning Behind the Suits in TV Series 'It's A Sin'.

 According to John Flügel in The Psychology of Clothes (1930), the emergence and diffusion of men’s suits was “a move away from flamboyance and individuality”. In the following decades, they also became a symbol of economic and traditional state power in the hands of men who would suit up every day to go to work.

Perhaps said powerful men would go to Savile Row, famed for its tailors, to find their best uniform. In It’s a Sin, Colin, played by Callum Scott Howells, has just moved to London to start his training in a tailor’s shop on the same iconic street. He is shy, self-effacing, and has not had the opportunity to meet anyone from the LGBTQIA+ community he knows he belongs to. The suits he wears onscreen tell the same story.

“When working on Savile Row, Colin is adopting this brown tailoring because all the other tailors within this environment are wearing the same colour palette and style,” says the show’s costume designer, Ian Fulcher. “In a way, he hasn’t found his identity. It’s almost as if his inexperience of the greater world is reflected in these browns and earthy tones. He is blending, not standing out in the crowd.”

Having his queerness constrained by a suit is something the flamboyant Roscoe (Omari Douglas) goes through, too. In order to please the Tory MP who ends up becoming his sugar daddy, he has to tone down his exuberance by wearing grey and navy suits in spaces where he is the only subordinate gay Black man — his true self sacrificed on the altar of fitting in.

When he has to dress up just like his father (Delroy Brown) to attend his sister’s wedding, he looks imprisoned by the suit he is wearing. “The wedding attire is not his choice,” says Fulcher. “There is no Roscoe here, because he is putting on a uniform. That’s why it’s really important that when he arrives at the wedding and sees his father, he chooses to put his eyeshadow on, to become himself again. He’s embracing who he is.”

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