His Suits Come Alive From the Waist Down

New York Times

23-04-2025

For the past five years, Jack Sivan has been running a small tailoring and men's wear business out of the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his wife and three guinea pigs (Bagel, Panda and Faun). Recent events have had him thinking about working someplace other than his home.
Mr. Sivan's namesake brand received outsize exposure this year when the actor Ato Essandoh, a star of the Netflix series 'The Diplomat,' wore a custom tuxedo to the Screen Actors Guild Awards in February. The ensemble included a cropped midnight blue jacket with satin lapels, a crisp white button-up shirt, a black bow tie and a long pleated skirt that nearly fell to the floor.
'When I put it on, it just felt good,' Mr. Essandoh said in an interview, adding that his stylist, John Tan, had introduced him to Mr. Sivan. 'Sometimes you wear something and it feels right,' the actor said. 'It felt regal and I loved the way that it flowed.' The tuxedo caught the attention of Mr. Essandoh's peers like his 'Diplomat' castmate Keri Russell and the 'Abbott Elementary' actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, he said, who stopped him and 'was like, 'Boy, look at what you're wearing!''
Not long before dressing Mr. Essandoh, Mr. Sivan landed his first wholesale account with Ford General, a store in Chicago. In May, it will start selling pieces from Mr. Sivan's burgeoning ready-to-wear line, which includes items like a double-breasted linen blazer ($1,155), striped linen pants ($575) and a matching military-inspired jacket ($685).
Mr. Sivan's custom suits start at about $2,200; their prices vary based on fabrics and other factors. His business has taken over much of the living room in his apartment near Prospect Park, which has workstations with sewing machines and metal shelves where materials and clothing patterns are stored. There are also multiple mannequins that Mr. Sivan, 28, dresses in clothes he is making, which on a recent visit to the space included a pinstripe chore coat made of Italian shetland flannel wool and a brown coat that still had sewing pins in a pocket and the collar.
Most of Mr. Sivan's customers have sought traditional suiting, but Mr. Essandoh has not been the only one to take interest in his skirted styles. Last September, at a pop-up shop Mr. Sivan opened in downtown Manhattan, a skirt suit was displayed in a window. 'That brought in a lot of people, just all ages, all genders,' said Persephone Bennett, 29, an associate designer for Mr. Sivan. 'They were like, 'That is interesting to me and I want that.''
Mr. Sivan, of course, started making skirted men's wear long after other designers — Thom Browne, Jean Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto among them — introduced their own versions. His pieces are designed with a range of wearers in mind, he said, and tend to have curvier cuts that take inspiration from flared 1970s suiting and from women's wear silhouettes.
'Each thing I'm making, maybe the decisions are small, but someone's identity is in those decisions,' Mr. Sivan said. To help telegraph the inclusive nature of his clothes, people like Lauren Ezersky, a 70-something former fashion television journalist, and Nikhil Kapoor, a plus-size influencer, have been tapped to model them.
'A lot of the narrative around popular tailoring is that it's very conformist,' Mr. Sivan said.
He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design — where he studied apparel design and where he met Ms. Bennett — and freelanced at the Row and the denim brand R13 before starting his business. Mr. Sivan grew up in Brookline, Mass., just outside Boston, and said he became interested in fashion in high school.
'The concept of clothing as language was novel to me,' he said. 'It caught my interest at an age when most young people are coming to terms who they are as an individual with more opinions and more agency.'
In the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 spread, Mr. Sivan, like many garment industry workers, started making 'so many masks,' he said. With more time on his hands because of the lockdowns, he also began to seek out clients looking for custom pieces and slowly started to grow his tailoring business. Many of his customers have never worked with custom tailors, Mr. Sivan added.
'Suddenly, a world of opportunities opens up and they're just like, 'Actually I do care what kind of pocket shape I have on my jacket,'' he said. 'Or, 'I do really care that this waistband is a little bit higher.''
After years of dress codes becoming more casual, Mr. Sivan said he had been excited to notice a renewed interest in formal wear.
'It was concerning how the needs for suits were kind of disappearing,' he said. 'Really, the only job that really requires you to wear a suit these days is if you're a lawyer. But I think what that's turned into is a realization that a suit doesn't have to be a uniform. It can be a fun thing that you're dressing up in or you're just wearing out. It can be casual. It's just a matching set.'