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These are the glory days of the sports jacket. It is the garment of our times, colonizing almost every corner of the wardrobe. Its realm stretches from the suit rack to the T-shirt drawer, from the most exquisitely tailored design to something soft and unstructured that looks as casual (and feels as comfortable) as an untucked shirt. It might be made of wool, like a suit, but it could be cotton or linen, leather or suede, bamboo or a blend of cashmere and mink. Its range of colours and patterns nudges the infinite.

Our notion of what a sports jacket is has never been so all-encompassing. But the real reason for its success is what a sports jacket can do. We wear it to work with dress pants, dress shirt and tie, confident of its propriety. When the weekend comes, we put on the same jacket over a knit and a pair of jeans and feel simultaneously casual and well turned-out. On fall days, we reach for it as we’re leaving the house, treating it like a coat and maybe adding a scarf. Going out to a restaurant, theatre or cocktail party, where our fathers would have put on a suit, we put on a jacket – with a polo-neck sweater, perhaps, or an open-neck, boldly patterned sport shirt. Such versatility! The one thing we don’t do in a sports jacket is sports – unless we’re staying at an old-fashioned English country house and choose to go riding or join the shooting party.

The past
That’s where the sports jacket was born, in the later half of the 19th century, to meet a gentleman’s very specific needs. Tailored in heavy-duty tweed, it was rugged enough to offer protection from the elements and a degree of camouflage on the autumnal moors. Large side pockets were handy for cartridges while pleats at the back allowed a necessary freedom of movement when a man had to lift his gun suddenly to his shoulder. Before long, men who enjoyed hacking (casual riding in the countryside) added other modifications such as slanted pockets and a rear vent that let the skirts of the jacket hang comfortably over each hip.

These very practical garments quickly became part of a country gentleman’s wardrobe and, by the 1920s, had infiltrated the city, still patterned in tweedy herringbones and checks but cut more like a blazer and from slightly lighter cloth. Men who put on a suit every working day and felt underdressed in a sweater would reach for an “odd jacket” when puttering about at home on weekends. Daring iconoclasts even wore them in public over a pair of grey flannel trousers, no doubt raising eyebrows in conservative circles. From the 1930s on, most well-dressed men had a jacket or two for those rare occasions when a suit seemed too formal. Bohemian artists, writers and academics, who wished to distance themselves from more commercial professions but still look authoritative, adopted it as a virtual uniform.

The sports jacket lay quiet for a decade or three. There was a lurid flurry in the early ’60s when plaid jackets found favour with corny vocal groups and used-car salesmen but the next evolutionary step had to wait until the 1970s and the rise of Italian design. Tailored as meticulously as any suit and from the finest fabrics, Italian jackets took Europe by storm but North American men still felt more comfortable in a suit, perhaps with a blazer for Fridays. Then came the 1990s and the emergence of the business casual alternative. Denied the safe conformity of the suit, men were obliged to think as never before about what they should wear. How smart or how casual was the occasion? How could they avoid looking scruffy or, worse in those post-recession years, stuffily overdressed? The sports jacket was the solution.

The present
And so it remains. The pendulum has since swung back towards the suit but the legacy of choice, the desire to dress appropriately to the occasion, is with us still. Twenty years ago, suits outsold jackets by a ratio of ten-to-one. Today, the numbers are almost equal.

The sports jacket is the cornerstone of modern casual dressing. Choosing what to wear with it offers a man innumerable ways to express his individuality. It starts with the choice of trousers but includes shoes, shirt or knit, the options of a tie and a pocket square. In the fall, layer the look with a cashmere sweater and a scarf; in the summer, a lightweight, unlined, unstructured jacket looks great over a T-shirt.

No rules of coordination really apply – personal taste is paramount – but there are one or two things that find general consensus. The weight and fineness of jacket and trouser fabrics should be roughly complimentary (that elegant cashmere Italian blazer needs dress pants not jeans, for example; that tan corduroy jacket needs trousers with a more rugged texture and loafers or boots, not a dress shoe). It’s a holistic exercise with half a dozen components.

The sports jacket continues to evolve and so do the ways in which we wear it. Here’s a confident young man braving the paparazzi outside the black-tie gala: he’s in a one-button velvet jacket instead of a tuxedo. There’s a business traveller in a sharp Italian blazer: he’ll wear it with a shirt and tie to tomorrow’s meetings and a casual knit when the day’s work is done. You get the picture. Meeting our needs, expanding our options, the sports jacket is now the most important piece of clothing we own.