Bad wording i know. I mean, the modern idea of what a suit looks like. When did the suit, as we know it, come to form? What year or era did we start wearing them like the way we wear them?
The suit as we currently know it is generally credited to the efforts of a man named Beau Brummell (1778-1840), a friend of the future King George IV when he was Prince Regent of England, during the period we know as the Regency (for perhaps obvious reasons). Before the early nineteenth century, men's dress was considerably more elaborate. Instead of trousers, men wore a getup called knee breeches and stockings. Hyacinthe Rigaud's 1701 [Portrait of King Louis XIV] (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Hyacinthe_Rigaud_-Louis_XIV%2C_roi_de_France%281638-1715%29_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg) gives you a sense of what we are talking about. Brummell's great innovation was to adapt the more practical clothing of a military officer, which included full-length trousers and a cravat at the neck, as well as a more sober palette, to civilian wear. His influence at court assured that England's upper classes took his style of dress seriously, and many adopted it.
This style of dress took time to catch on around the Western world, and it gradually evolved throughout the nineteenth century to look more and more like what we today consider the business suit. To take one example, Richard Caton Woodville's War News From Mexico contains men who wear different stages of the evolution of the concept. The older man to the right wears a version that still relies on breeches rather than full-length trousers, while the man holding the newspaper at center wears something that we might almost consider "modern" dress.
Hi, fyi you'll find more information on this subject here
