A light-weight wool gabardine suit in fawn, a shade of light brown, is a great suit for spring when it’s fairly warm but too early to take out the summer suits. In For Your Eyes Only, Bond wears the light brown suit in Corfu to church for his confession to Q. This suit has a button two front with a low button stance. It has soft shoulders with a roped sleeve heads. The chest is clean and the waist is fitted. The coat has three buttons on the cuffs, straight pockets with flaps and double vents. The trousers are cut with a straight leg and have a flat front with frogmouth pockets.
The shirt is mid blue poplin, darker than the light blue shirt Bond wears with his navy chalkstripe suit earlier in For Your Eyes Only. The shirt has a large spread collar, a front placket and mitred two-button cuffs. Figuring out the tie is a little tricky. It’s slate blue with stripes or heavy ribs, but there’s more to it than that. Nonetheless, it’s a subtle pattern and well-chosen for Bond. Bond’s shoes are chestnut brown slip-ons.
This suit is beautiful and one of my all time favourites from the series. I was looking forward to you covering it. It’s just a pity it gets such a fleeting outing in the film.
Moore wore light brown or beige suits in many of his Bond movies and, indeed, he wears another similarly coloured and styled Hayward suit in A View to A Kill for scenes in San Francisco. (Could it be the same suit? Probably not.) In that movie he wears it with a white or pale cream shirt and dark brown striped tie. That works fine but the blue shirt and tie here really make the whole ensemble really stand out. The contrasting, cream colour buttons I also like when darker brown would’ve been the obvious choice. Very, very elegant. And again, sadly, like the blazers and ivory dinner jackets not an item Bond has worn in recent times.
A clean riposte to those who regard Moore as an unstylish or “naff” Bond.
I would just say that it doesn’t appear to me to be a spring atmosphere in these scenes, more summer when one looks at the dress of the background people. Then again, spring on Corfu is probably warm enough for summer clothes.
This suit is beautiful and one of my all time favourites from the series. I was looking forward to you covering it. It’s just a pity it gets such a fleeting outing in the film.
Moore wore light brown or beige suits in many of his Bond movies and, indeed, he wears another Hayward suit in what appears to me to be almost the same colour in A View to A Kill for scenes in San Francisco. (Could it be the same suit? Probably not.) In that movie he wears it with a white or pale cream shirt and brown striped tie. That works fine but the blue shirt and tie here really make it stand out. The contrasting, cream colour buttons I also like when darker brown would’ve been the obvious choice. Very, very elegant. And again, sadly, like the blazers and ivory dinner jackets not an item Bond has worn in recent times.
A clean riposte to those who regard Moore as an unstylish or “naff” Bond.
As For Your Eyes Only's Greek scenes were filmed in September or October 1980 it won't be Spring but maybe it's meant to represent Spring
The weather in September/October is about the same as it is now, except for the amount of rainfall. I didn't say that Bond wore it in spring, but it's equally appropriate in both seasons. Gabardine suits are at their best in late spring and early autumn. Like many Bond films, there is no indication of when this one takes place. I would guess that it takes place around March because of the skiing scenes. A few movies do, however, give a time of year: Thunderball has the Junkanoo, which is on Dec 26 or Jan 1. OHMSS has Christmas. Moonraker has Carnival, which is around February. And A View to a Kill has the Royal Ascot in June. But because these movies are filmed over half a year, it's hard to put an exact time of year on most of them.
Once again a very nice offering from Hayward. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that FYEO is Moore's finest film, not only because of the classic "From Russia With Love" inspired plot but also because it is the one in which Moore's style is most timeless and elegant, not to mention his fine performance as an actor.
Didn't you post this one once before?
It is the same article as before. I had to make a change to the tags and it bumped it up to today. Now it's back where it was.
A favourite of mine as well.
Would look just as good in 2011 as it did in 1981. A pity we only see it for a minute before moving onto the final act of the picture.
As usual Moore sticks out like a sore thumb in his flashy colours and flat fabrics. This suit is absolutely beautiful and the shirt and tie works wonderful, but… not on a spy who is supposed to blend in everywhere!!
If that was the case then we wouldn’t have this blog in the first place, Jerzy. Bond’s legendary sartorial style is part of the charcter’s entertainment. Who cares about so-called plausability in a Bond movie.
I’m a bit confused as to what colours here are flashy. And I don’t understand what “flat fabrics” is supposed to mean. The cloth appears to be a classic wool gabardine. It’s a less business-like cloth than a grey serge, for example, so Bond has dressed down as much as he can whilst still wearing a suit. Bond shouldn’t be dressed like the tourists in the background.
I don’t understand what he’s getting at either, Matt? Perhaps he will clarify. I don’t see anything at all “flashy” here, quite the opposite. Maybe it’s the usual anti-brown bias again. Of course, Bond shouldn’t look like the rest of the run of the mill people about him, as I said, it’s his exceptional sartorial elegance that we all admire him for.
Is the button stance low enough in this suit to complement the low rise trousers worn today?
It might almost be low enough. It would certainly look better with low-rise trousers than the modern high button stance does!