I like wearing suits. I do it between two and four days a week. Not because I have to, but because I want to. I get dressed faster on days when I wear a suit. I feel grown-up, handsome, even a little glamorous, on suit days.

But recently I began to feel at odds with my suit wardrobe. Some of my older suits suddenly felt uncomfortably tight. Constricting. Dorky. Ugh.

And I know it's not just me: The suit has been in a tricky place for the past few years. Silicon Valley rejected the suit as a symbol of a whole global infrastructure that needed disrupting. The corporate world abandoned it. Fashion, too. My generation's love of the sneaker and the T-shirt has evolved into an all-consuming obsession with product and brands.

And yet!

And yet the suit stays in the picture—you just have to know where to look.

Mashburn's "Virgil No. 3" suit style single-handedly gave me my mojo back. (Sid makes the boots and shirt, too, BTW.) Matteo Mobilio The suit will never lose its edge as long as Atlanta-based tailor extraordinaire Sid Mashburn is on the case. Courtesy of Mashburn

Well, here at GQ, we know where to look. And that's what a lot of the fashion pages in this big fall fashion issue are all about: suits that feel on point, even in this strange, almost suitless moment. Some of the suits in this issue are wild. Some are tame. But they're all unfussy. They are suits for the era of the slash and the side hustle. Suits that were designed not for the corporate office but for the street, the coffee meeting, the linkup at the bar.

For me this new suit energy just recently clicked into place. I was in Atlanta for my 20th high school reunion, and some friends and I stopped by Atlanta's great men's shop, Sid Mashburn. The fabric of a certain suit caught my eye. I pulled it off the rack. The tag noted that the style was called the “Virgil No. 3.” I tried it on.

Sidney Poitier as detective Virgil Tibbs in the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. The way he wore this suit gave Mashburn the inspiration for the Virgil—his “updated, sexier” sack suit. The Mirisch Corporation / Ronald Grant Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

It fit like a dream—a new dream. It was loose, easygoing, chill. The closer I looked, the more I noticed that this suit had no details. No chest darts, no ticket pocket, no side vents, no sharp tapering, no working buttons, no “interesting” lining. It just hung off my frame…perfectly. It didn't even need tailoring. For the first time in my entire life, I had them leave the jacket as is, right off the rack. Since that day, I've been wearing it twice a week.

The Virgil was a revelation. To better understand its origins, I called up the man who designed it. “The Virgil is named for Sidney Poitier's character in In the Heat of the Night,” Sid Mashburn tells me in his smooth Mississippi accent. “It's the sexier, cooler sack suit. It's got tracing without too much shaping. There's no pinch at the waist or anything—it just follows the line of your body. It's clean, unfussy, almost minimal. I'm wearing one today!”

If you're wondering, legend has it that the sack suit got that name because it fits you like a potato sack. In a good way. It is as chilled out and un-sartorial as a suit can get. It's for the guy who loves being the only one at the table wearing a suit—but doesn't want to feel like an out-of-touch dorkus doing it.

Sure, the sneaker rules the menswear world right now. But thanks to guys like Sid Mashburn—and me, and hopefully you—the suit abides.

Will Welch is GQ's Editor-In-Chief.

A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2019 issue with the title "The Suit for the Suitless Era."

Watch:

Rami Malek is An Overnight Sensation