Let’s be honest, there’s nothing exciting about a business suit – you can brighten it with a tie and some flashy cufflinks but that’s about it.
Unfortunately that means that all the London commuters heading over to the City or Canary Wharf, dressed in their familiar grey or black two and three-piece suits, are stuck with a particularly drab look at this time of year, matching the dull autumn weather!
There is a solution however. You could consider putting something suitably colourful in the buttonhole on the left lapel of your jacket. Legend has it that this was one of the many British cultural traditions invented by Prince Albert – on their wedding day Queen Victoria is purported to have presented him with a small floral bouquet. Not knowing quite what to do with it, he impulsively cut a hole in his jacket and put the flowers there – to this day every suit follows the convention that he established back in 1840 with an appropriately placed buttonhole sewn into it.
Of course opportunities to take advantage of this particular feature of the business suit do present themselves from time to time – on March 1 many Welsh expats in London take the opportunity to place a daffodil in their buttonhole, and no wedding would be complete without the men sporting a rose or a carnation in support of Victorian traditions (which also gave us the white wedding dress by the way).
Some charities have also adopted the idea, with Marie Curie Cancer Care supporting the wearing of a daffodil in the Spring and the less well-known Alexandra ‘rose day’, which annually supports a raft of small charities, gives you an excuse to wear one of their sweeter smelling relatives too.
If you want to be a little flamboyant and make the autumn a bit brighter why not extend the period that you wear a flower in your buttonhole to encompass the whole year? You could wear something that compliments your tie, for example. It might also make you stand out when you meet people in a business setting.
These days its easy to find flowers even if you don’t have a local outlet – you can use an online London florist, and arrange a flower delivery anywhere in London.
A more colourful world is just a phone call away…
This is a sponsored post.