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Researching my book, Sharp Suits, was like building a 3-D model of the DNA chain. Each book or article I read, or conversation I had, gave me another link or two to the fascinating story of how we got to the men's suits we know today. There was also the delight of rediscovering the suits we had in yesteryear, but which have been lost over time.

As a rough guide, we can say that the single-breasted “lounge suit” was accepted by polite society, led by the British royal family, in the mid-1860s. Coincidentally, this was the exact time that the demands for tens of thousands of uniforms in the American Civil War acted as a spur for U.S. manufacturers to devise better ways of producing factory-made clothes. It was also around the time that the relatively new invention of photography meant that style innovations could be disseminated to a wider audience more effectively than ever before.

There have been many such cross-influences affecting men’s suits over the past 150 years, but there are some universal truths about selecting a suit that are worth remembering as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.

Suit truth: Fit is everything

Something as classic as a gray three-button suit can make you look anonymous or make you stand out like a beacon of style. Your sense of style, degree of personal swagger and your accessories will make a difference, but the most important aspect of the look is the fit. The biggest difference between a bespoke suit and an off-the-rack suit is that the former will envelope your body more closely. This is a strange sensation at first when you graduate from ready-mades to made-to-measure or full bespoke.

The clue to all of this is that ready-made suits have larger arm holes than custom-made garments. Off-the-rack jackets need to accommodate guys with big arms and guys with smaller arms -- the easiest solution is to make a big armhole. However, that means that there is more fabric at the side of the jacket below the armhole, so the fit is more relaxed, or comfortable, or full (select your own word, but it still doesn’t fit as well as a tailor-made suit).

Suit truth: Cloth weight matters

Among the 150 or so images in my book, photos from 100 years ago show suits looking pretty much like suits of today. The most significant difference between those garments and today’s are the sophistication of construction, and the relative lightness of modern cloths, canvases, interlinings, shoulder pads, and the rest of the hidden skeleton of a suit.

Suiting cloths weighing in at 15 or 16 ounces a yard (or more) were normal for our grandfathers; but, thanks largely to the requirements of tailors’ clients in southern Italy and the southern United States, mills have been lowering the weight of fabrics for decades.

Beware of getting caught up in the frenzy of lighter-weight cloths and the demand for ever higher “super” designations. To perform time after time, to keep its shape and to bounce back after wearing, a suit cloth needs to have a certain weight, a certain gravitas. Most Savile Row tailors like to use between 9-ounce and 12-ounce cloths; they know what they are doing.

Suit truth: There's a suit for every man

One of the most common criticisms of the suit from nonbelievers is that “all suits look the same.” What nonsense. A jacket can be single- or double-breasted. It can carry one button or 10 buttons. It can have wide lapels, narrow lapels, notched lapels, peaked lapels -- or even no lapels (although I’m not a fan of that look). It can have one, two or no vents. I don’t even have space to mention the outer pockets.

Trousers can be narrow or wide, with or without pleats, baggy or roomy, and held up with braces, a belt or neither. They can have slant pockets, straight pockets or no pockets. And we haven’t even started to consider the cloth: the fiber composition, the weight, the colour, the pattern…

What’s important is to blend the elements that are right for your body shape, where you want to wear the suit and your budget. Expert help is essential to get it right -- find yourself a good tailor or a great retailer to sift through 150 years of options.

Suit truth: Less is more

Researching the images in Sharp Suits convinced me that despite all of the possible permutations of a man’s suit, less, almost always, is more. Extreme looks can capture the temporary imagination, but subtle nuances are often more effective in creating a wearable, enviable style.

For example, the early 1960s look of Pierre Cardin’s collarless and lapel-free “Beatle suit” now looks curious rather than desirable. It’s the same with Jean Paul Gaultier’s play with proportions of the early 1980s; skirts for men are an aberration. End of story.

But, I could happily welcome a revival of the masculine, body-conscious silhouette championed most notably by Renoma of Paris in the 1960s. The two images of cool French pop star Jacques Dutronc are among my favorites in the book. High armholes and a suppressed waist on a long-line jacket married to fairly wide parallel trousers -- that’s sharp. We suit fans are so lucky to have such history to draw upon