Pinstripe suits are back – and stars from Harry Styles to Ryan Gosling are wearing them
Sombr chose Valentino for the Met Gala, Kristen Stewart wore Tom Ford, and Nick Jonas suited up for Milan Fashion Week in Ralph Lauren Purple Label
Held annually at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the star-studded event brings together the world’s most famous faces to raise funds for the museum’s Costume Institute. This year’s exhibition, “Costume Art”, explores the relationship between clothing and the body, pairing historical and modern garments with art objects spanning 5,000 years of history. The dress code, Fashion Is Art, invited guests to treat the body as a canvas, with fashion a form of artistic expression.
Several guests chose pinstripe suiting as their artistic subject. Al Sharpton, the political activist and Baptist minister, arrived in a metallic golden pinstripe suit designed by his partner, New York fashion designer Aisha McShaw. “I wanted to show something solid but flashy at the same time,” he said on the famous carpeted stairs, “because I’m an urban New Yorker but at the same time, I can blend with the elitist crowd.” McShaw, who entered the fashion industry as a stylist, launched her womenswear label in 2017, and previously dressed Sharpton at the 2025 Met Gala in a dandy-inspired black tie with ruffled sleeves.
Sombr marked his first Met Gala appearance in a custom Valentino look designed by Alessandro Michele, who joined the Italian house as creative director in 2024. The glam-rock musician paired a hand-embroidered tulle and chiffon cape in a dégradé of silver and grey hues that reportedly took more than 500 hours to complete, with a lamé lace top embellished with an asymmetrical crêpe de Chine and satin motif and, most notably, trousers embellished with a silver pinstripe pattern.
Beyond its current red carpet appearances, the pinstripe’s origins are more utilitarian than one might expect. The pattern first emerged in the banking houses of Victorian London, where each institution adopted its own distinct stripe width or colour so that employees from different banks were immediately recognisable on the street. By the early 20th century, it had become the standard suit of the city and, later, Wall Street.
Its more thrilling chapter came in the 1920s, when American gangsters adopted the pinstripe as a uniform of their own. The 1980s also gave the pattern a second wind, when broader, bolder stripes became the look of a decade defined by financial excess. Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street and Patrick Bateman, the investment banker and villain protagonist of American Psycho (2000), became its Hollywood symbols, and for a time the pinstripe felt inseparable from a particular kind of corporate ruthlessness.