Fashion

How to wear a belted blazer

A blazer is the perfect weight for the British summer – and the belt gives it a bit of va-va-voom

Look. I’m dressed! Properly dressed. Being properly dressed hasn’t been a thing since it was coat weather, so I feel a bit out of the loop, to be honest. I haven’t been paying my usual close attention to the plot of Fashion with a capital F. You know that thing when you start watching the latest episode of your current Netflix series and it dawns on you that you must have dozed off somewhere before the end of the last one, because there are whole subplots that are lost on you and characters who you’ve never seen before and, well, you’ve slightly lost the thread? That’s me right now, trying to work out what to wear.

But a belted blazer makes sense right now. A blazer is smart, but not in a jazz-hands kind of a way. Also, it is the perfect weight of outerwear for much of the British summer. Yes, a denim jacket is, too, but the blazer was made iconic by Yves Saint Laurent and the denim jacket by Britney Spears. Just saying.

I like to think adding a belt makes the blazer a bit less office-safe and gives it a bit more va-va-voom, as Yves might have said. A belt-cinch turns the boxy, masculine lines into something more tousled and trench-coat-ish. It also makes the blazer feel more like a proper coat; you can’t now just slip it off and hang it over the back of your chair, because then what to do with the belt, right? So the belt commits you to the outfit.

Also, I like a belted blazer right now because it is bona fide Fashion. If football games played behind closed doors are the Geisterspiele – or ghost games – then the summer collections that have been mothballed inside stores since it was cold outside could be called a Geistersommer. Summer fashion, but without audience participation. And so to be able to wear a belted blazer – a star piece on the catwalk of the Saint Laurent spring/summer 2020 collection, which was itself a homage to the late great Yves – feels like a small step toward bringing fashion back to life.