Since the EU is staffed by suits, pension funds are run by suits, your office is stuffed with suits and my First Great Western (07.46, Newbury to Paddington) is heavy with suits, I can't be the only woman in the world who ever looked at a bloke in bog-standard officewear and wondered what sex had to do with it. 'Suit' is a four-letter word these days, an empty envelope of soulless gaberdine. You call a man 'a suit' in order to rid him of his humanity - let alone his sexuality.

Anyway, since men have been wearing suits since before I was born (and for 150 years before that), how can they be thought of as 'modern dress'? Your modern guys - your Beckhams, your Britpack actors, pop idols, computer geeks, Labour MPs who want the Commons to institute 'dressed-down Thursdays' - all run a mile from suits, don't they? Sarongs, yes. Football shirts, yes. Pre-school toddlers' clothes with elastic waists and no fly-buttons, yes. But suits?

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