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“The hitman,” Savile Row tailor Dominic Sebag-Montefiore says, “needs to be able to go everywhere. The right tailoring can do that.” The Edward Sexton creative director is in the process of answering some very important questions. Chief among them: should John Wick really be wearing a suit for the business of slaughtering his foes? Sure, James Bond has done it on-screen for sixty years, but 007 is no gun-fu artist and he's not killing nearly as many people. The answer, we soon come to understand, is more nuanced than you might expect.
If you’ve seen even one of the four John Wick films, you’ll know that all-black suiting is as central to the action as a bloated kill count and a puppy worth dying for. It’s a connection made particularly explicit in John Wick: Chapter 4, out in cinemas today: in its opening scene, Wick accepts a suit bag from Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King, thus triggering his latest rampage. Perhaps, like us, you’ve surely watched Wick off his twelfth foe in quick succession and wondered: is a “42 Regular” jacket really the best garb for all of this slicing and dicing?
Given the right considerations, Montefiore thinks so. While he’s quick to note that Edward Sexton would never knowingly dress a hitman (wallets away, mafia muscle), he does help us hypothetically style a contract killer. “If you’re talking to a tailor, the boring, obvious question is the function of the clothes," he says. "Do you choose something that’s going to [support] lots of fighting, moving and getting hot? Do you go for something hard-wearing? Or do you go for something with a bit of stretch so you can do the spinning high kicks and all that stuff?” You know, totally normal suiting questions.
For Montefiore, the most interesting part of dressing an assassin is the social cachet and access-all-areas camouflage a suit allows for. “Lots of rogues use the suit to hide their roguish ways — to look more like a gentleman," he says. "That’s the thing about a bespoke suit: it’s the ease, it’s the fit, it’s the balance. You can make a bit of a statement without shouting. It’s supposed to be there.”
And so John Wick moves from nightclub to Continental to chop shop without trouble, unencumbered by his meatheaded martial artistry. In the waterfall-fringed Berlin club we see him enter in Chapter 4, his black suit helps him fit in so seamlessly that even several grisly dispatches don’t deter the revellers that dance around him.
Presumably, the John Wick costume department also made a choice that would differentiate the Keanu Reeves character from that other tailored, gun-toting rogue: James Bond. Wick never wears a bow tie, nor does he seek out double breasting or a variation in material, style or colour. It’s a function of his Americanness, just as his Mustang directly parallels the Britishness of Bond’s Aston Martin. In some ways, Montefiore sees his clients as more masculine Wicks or slightly more feminine Bonds. “The typical male client wants his suit, he wants it to be right and he doesn't want to have to fuss about it.” But Bond? “He’s fussy in the way he dresses.”
While Bond chooses his own clothes, then, it’s likely that a tailor does most of the heavy lifting for Wick. Case in point, this exchange in the second film: “What style?” “Italian.” “How many buttons?” “Two.” “Trousers?” “Tapered.” “Lining?” “Tactical.” Laconic and to the point, just like his murdering, Montefiore thinks the John Wick ethos seems to run a little like this: "You brush your teeth, you brush your hair, you put on your suit, you get your gun and off you go.”
Gun-fu, muscle car driving and protecting dogs at all costs: it turns out that a suit is the ideal garb for all of it. High arm holes, a highly cut crotch and double venting: all of these things, Montefiore tells us, guarantee freedom of movement. In the absence of kevlar lining, silk for evening and “high twist open weave” wool for day will do. Looking unbelievably cool in the process? That's only a bonus.
