The best navy blue suit should be the unsung hero of your wardrobe. It’s professional enough to wear to a job interview, serious enough for a wedding or a funeral, and when mixed and matched with jeans, chinos, sweaters, polos—or, okay, pretty much anything else in your closet—ready to add a dash of pulled-together polish to your more casual fits. Hell, you’d have to squint pretty hard to find a destination, aside from maybe the weight room or a karate dojo, where a navy blue suit (or its constituent pieces) would look remotely out of place.
But as easy as it is to make an argument in favor of adding a perfectly tailored navy suit to your quiver of clothing, finding said perfectly tailored version can be a serious challenge. There are a lot of navy suits on the market, and some are quantifiably worthier of closet space than others. Whether you’re shopping for a sublime dark blue number to wear to all those imminent summer weddings, your next date night, the office, or—and here’s the real kicker—all three, your pals at GQ Recommends went deep on the absolute best of ‘em, each ready and raring to see you through those (and countless other) occasions in impeccable fashion.
The Best Navy Blue Suit, According to GQ
- The Overall Pick: Sid Mashburn Kincaid No. 3 Wool-Flannel Suit, $1,875
- The Entry-Level Pick: Buck Mason Italian Wool Graduate Suit, $746
- The Weather-Agnostic Pick: Drake's Tropical Wool Suit, $2,490
- The Titan of Industry Pick: Tom Ford “O'Connor” Super 130s Suit, $5,250
- The Summer-Specific Pick: Todd Snyder Italian Seersucker Sutton Suit, $766
The Best Navy Blue Suit Overall
When you think “classic navy suit,” this two-piece number from Atlanta’s favorite tailor is probably what you’re picturing. The Kincaid No. 3 is Mashburn’s Goldilocks suit, with a just-right blend of high-quality construction, a slim-but-not-skinny silhouette and versatile notch lapels. Mashburn’s suiting is priced in the middle of the ready-to-wear scale, but details like the soft-yet-sturdy flannel from Biella (the source of some of the best fabric in Italy), surgeon’s cuffs, and a three-layer canvassed jacket that will adapt to the shape of your body over time are proof that you’re getting your money’s worth.
The Best Entry-Level Navy Blue Suit
Buck Mason focuses on fit and fabric with a dash of Steve McQueen ruggedness mixed in, which is exactly what their Graduate blazer and pants deliver. Thanks to its substantial Italian wool fabric, the three-roll-two jacket (a two-button style with a third button tucked under the lapel roll for additional volume) is heavy enough to see you through most of the year, with patch pockets and a single vent that casually pay homage to the heyday of Ivy League style. True to its name, this is the perfect suit—both in versatility and price—for anyone starting on their tailoring journey.
The Best Navy Blue Suit for Most Seasons
Drake's
Tropical Wool Tailored Jacket
As anyone who’s soaked through a shirt inside a poorly ventilated summer wedding venue knows all too well, not all suits are, uh, suited to hot weather. Drake’s’ solves that problem with the London clothier’s signature panache, thanks to an unlined half-canvassed jacket and pants made from lightweight tropical merino wool. Despite sharing a source with your favorite fisherman’s sweater, tropical wool’s net-like weave makes it one of the most breathable fabrics you can get, and a go-to for anyone in search of a high-quality summer suit. Better still, its high-twist yarn gives the jacket and pants impressive wrinkle resistance, making them an essential addition to your weekend bag or carry-on this summer.
The Best Navy Blue Suit for Titans of Industry
Few menswear designers command quite the same level of adulation as Ford when it comes to suits, and most of the reasons for this are on display here. If it’s good enough for Daniel Craig (who wore the O’Connor onscreen in No Time to Die and Spectre) it’s surely good enough for the rest of us. The jacket’s padded and lightly roped shoulders pay homage to the great tailors of Savile Row, while slimmer lapels and Ford’s signature slender waist lend it a tighter, more modern silhouette. The Super 130s fabric bears an oh-so-subtle glen check, which makes it both versatile and unusual, and the mouliné (which is made by twisting a single white cotton thread around the wool yarn) adds a delicate pop of texture. In a word: powerful.
The Best Navy Blue Suit for Summer
Seersucker, with its dandyish blue and white stripes and signature puckered texture, has been a go-to fabric for summer since the 1800s. As famously breathable as this cotton cloth is, though, it can come off a bit costumey (or worse yet: Colonel Sanders-y), especially when worn as a full suit. Snyder’s unstructured take gets the job done in a much subtler style with an Italian-made fabric in deep navy tone-on-tone. It’s shockingly comfortable, delightfully lightweight and just crinkly enough to stand out without making you look like you’re on your way to the Kentucky Derby.
Plus 8 More Sublime Navy Suits We Love
Some suits lean more old-school, some lean more avant-garde, and some mask delightfully avant-garde details in old-school form. Stockholm’s Saman Amel sets this three-roll-two firmly in the latter category, with its combination of wide, notch lapels and a slightly shrunken fit. Despite its right-now energy, details like welted pockets and a deadly serious navy-on-navy Italian herringbone wool fabric give it plenty of staying power.
Double-breasted suits are a world unto themselves, with half a dozen different button stances ranging from the minimalist 2x1 to the rakish 6x1. (For the mercifully uninitiated, the first number refers to the total number of buttons on the jacket; the second designates the number of buttonholes). The Armoury’s number of choice, a 6x2 with peak lapels made from Italian-milled wool, strikes the right balance between power suit seriousness and yacht club jauntiness.
This suit’s classic cut (notch lapels, double vents, lightly padded and roped shoulders) aside, the real star here is the tasteful, tonal striped fabric. Zegna is a fabric mill first and foremost, and 15Milmil15 represents the absolute best it has to offer, from the high-quality wool used to spin the ultrafine yarn to the painstakingly woven cloth. As the name indicates, the fibers used in this cloth measure just .015 of a millimeter, which translates to something that’s ethereally light and incredibly luxurious.
A double-breasted suit is something of an advanced sartorial move, and one made of linen (which is famously prone to rumpling) is doubly so. In the right hands, however, a linen DB is a powerful way to see yourself through the summer months in unmatched comfort and style. Soft shoulders, high armholes, and a slim fit give Ralph Lauren’s a distinctively breezy southern Italian look, and the dark navy hue helps to turn down the volume on those inevitable creases and wrinkles.
The best suits are the ones you’re inclined to get the most use out of, and everything about this single-button jacket and pleated trousers makes them worthy of heavy rotation in your wardrobe, both individually and together. Made at Stòffa’s workshop in Southern Italy, the jacket’s shirt-style construction, boxy fit, and lightweight tropical wool fabric help it look just as good with jeans and dainty slip-ons as it does in full suit mode.
Suit Single Breasted Navy High-Twist Wool
Anglo-Italian is a brand for suiting purists. No fashion, no gimmicks, no markdowns, just great suits in classic fits made with top-quality workmanship. Crafted from high-twist (read: wrinkle-resistant) Scottish wool, this navy joint boasts high-end details like hand-stitched lapels and buttonholes that offer a taste of the bespoke life for a (relatively) reasonable off-the-rack price.
There’s a good reason J.Crew has been a go-to destination for several generations of guys looking for their first real suit. Their nexus of style, quality, and price is hard to beat, and their sizing covers a broader range of bodies than most other brands. With wider lapels and a roomier fit than the brand’s era-defining Ludlow, the Crosby offers a slightly more traditional—and, not a little paradoxically, 2024—look, especially in Italian chalk stripe wool.
If you’re looking to add some Mediterranean nonchalance to your wardrobe, look no further than Boglioli, a family-owned brand that’s been defining modern Italian style since the ‘70s. With soft shoulders, high armholes and a slim, body-hugging fit, the Milano is your ticket to la dolce vita, with or without the Vespa.