Somebody thought of this first.
Two somebodies, in fact, and neither of them was us. Stuckey & Murray built a one-piece tuxedo in 2008. Jesse Herzog and Betabrand launched the Suitsy in 2014. Before we sell you anything, here’s the honest history.
2008 — the Fuxedo
The first one-piece tuxedo we can find belongs to Andy Stuckey and Jon Murray, the comedy-music duo who met as NBC pages in New York and have been working together since 2001. In 2008 they introduced what they described as a fully functional cross between a jumpsuit and a tuxedo, and called it the Fuxedo. It was designed by Trillian.
The specification should sound familiar, because it is essentially the garment on the rest of this website: a hidden zipper, a sewn-in bow tie and cummerbund, secured cuffs, and a two-way zip so the thing is wearable in the real world rather than just funny in a photograph.
And it was wearable. The detail that settles it is the one they lead with themselves: Murray wore his to his sister’s wedding. Not to a sketch, not to a bit — to a family wedding, in front of the family. They hoped to bring it to market by spring 2011.
It arrived as comedy, which is probably why it is less well remembered than what came later. That doesn’t make it less first. A working one-piece tuxedo existed in 2008, six years before the idea went viral under a different name, and this store sells a tuxedo — which makes the Fuxedo the closer ancestor of the two.
- The Fuxedo — Stuckey & Murray’s own page
- Funny Or Die — The Fuxedo (20 July 2008)
- Wikipedia — Stuckey and Murray
- Stuckey & Murray — about the duo
Their other work, for the record: semi-finalists on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, HBO’s Funny as Hell, The Chelsea Handler Show, Cash Cab, the Edinburgh Fringe and the Montreal Comedy Festival, and something north of 20 million views on their videos.
2014 — the Suitsy
Jesse Herzog was a San Francisco real estate developer with no background in fashion design whatsoever. What he had was a specific, universal frustration: he wanted, in his own words, “a way to look professional but feel like I was at home on my couch.”
The idea arrived by way of a gift. His wife gave him a kaftan — a long, loose tunic — and he found in it a combination of comfort and function that ordinary workwear simply refused to offer. The obvious question followed: why can’t a suit do this?
He worked with a seamstress to find out. What they built was, in essence, a pair of overalls disguised as dress trousers, a dress shirt and a matching jacket — with a zipper hidden behind the shirt-button placket, running down into the trouser fly. You step in, pull the zip, and you are dressed.
Herzog took it to Betabrand, the San Francisco company built around crowdfunding customer-submitted designs. The campaign launched in autumn 2014 — a grey version, sizes small through extra-large tall, $340 to pre-order.
It became a meme almost immediately, and a lightning rod for everything people loved and loathed about Silicon Valley at the time. Good Morning America called it quirky bohemian ingenuity. GQ read it as an omen for the end times. CNBC, CBS News, TODAY, ITV and Gizmodo all covered it within weeks. Gizmodo actually wore one.
Both reactions were, in their way, correct. It is a genuinely good idea and it is a slightly absurd object. That tension is most of the appeal.
- CBS News — Meet “Suitsy,” the one-piece men’s business suit
- TODAY — Goodbye three-piece suit, hello one-piece suit
- CNBC — The Suitsy! A business suit onesie
- ITV News — Man creates business suit onesie
- Gizmodo — A hands-on review of Suitsy
- Laughing Squid — The Suitsy, a business-suit onesie for adults by Betabrand
Why we’re telling you this
Because the idea is the hard part, and it wasn’t ours. Everything downstream — the satin peak lapels, the four-way stretch, the kids and baby cuts — is a variation on something other people worked out first: two comedians with a seamstress and a wedding to attend, and a man in San Francisco whose wife gave him a kaftan.
A product page that quietly implies it invented the category is the normal thing to do. We’d rather say plainly who got there first, and leave the links up so you can go and look.
What we changed
The Fuxedo was a tuxedo, and so is this — but ours comes in satin peak lapels, a pleated bib and three colours, and in three cuts rather than one. The Suitsy was a business suit in grey; we went the other direction, towards black tie.
The genuinely new part is the small end of the range. Nobody in this history made one for a seven-year-old ring bearer, or for a baby — and the baby cut needed a real rethink rather than a scale-down, because a zipper is the wrong mechanism when the garment has to open flat for a nappy change. That one snaps along the inseam instead.