There’s something about the guy in the pinstripe suit that always makes you double-take. It’s not a violation of the eye by any means, but it demands you look nevertheless. The precise vertical lines, whether bold or chalky, just seem to have an unerring knack of announcing themselves long before you’ve even noticed who it is actually wearing them. They are a bold, ballsy, sartorial statement, and ‘twas ever thus.
In the Victorian era, bank employees would don pinstripe suits with certain widths between the stripes to represent the financial institution they worked for. Using pinstripes to delineate different groups or institutions was a sartorial device that the Victorians had already deployed in the world of boating.