By DAVID COLMAN


Not long ago, big brass-buttoned military coats and high-lapel vests looked a bit extreme. Now these 19thcentury clothes (along with those ever-present beards and mustaches) have infiltrated the 21st-century wardrobe. The fall designer lines included cardinal-red tailcoats at Ralph Lauren, capes and bowlers at Alexander McQueen and knee breeches at Robert Geller.

As with home design, where curio cases, taxidermy and other stylish clutter of the Victorian era have been taken up by young hipsters, many of today’s popular men’s styles have their roots in the late 19th century. There are the three-piece suits once favored by Gilded Age bankers; the military greatcoats and boots of officers in the American Civil War; and the henley undershirts, plaid flannel shirts and stout drill trousers worn by plain, honest farmers.

The antiquarian aesthetic is farreaching, extending to the worlds of art (as in the work of the fashionable painter Walton Ford) and film (as in “There Will Be Blood,” “The Prestige” and the forthcoming “Sherlock Holmes”). But it has made its deepest inroads in interior design and men’s fashion.

The New York photographer Mitch Epstein said the style had so won him over that he recently bought a charcoal- plaid three-piece suit. “These are not the kind of clothes I was wearing. I’m more high modern,” he said. “But there’s a comfort and quality in them, a respect for what you wear and how you appear to others, but in a way that’s not heavy-handed.”

Part of the appeal is in how the clothes relate not to the runways or the estates of Europe, but to America’s heartland. Country and city men alike have rediscovered old-school American brands like Filson, Orvis, L. L. Bean and Duluth Pack. Obsolete hobbies like wet-plate photography are finding new enthusiasts. Even deer hunting with old-fashioned muzzle-loaded rifles has come back in force in some parts of the United States.

Who knows, maybe the comeback of the North American beaver population will lead to a new appreciation of beaver-fur hats. They would be welcome at Paul Stuart, where beaver collars adorn greatcoats, or at the Harlem workshop of the hatter Rod Keenan, who has been selling bowlers, derbies and, this season, even top hats.

This flamboyance is part of a curious new movement called Tweed Rides, informal gatherings of spiffily dressed ladies and gents cycling leisurely through town. They began in London earlier this year and have spread to Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Eric Brewer, a gallery owner who founded Dandies and Quaintrelles, the group that is organizing the Washington ride, said the idea was not to come out in costume. “There are all kinds of societies that are about dressing up in period costume and then going back to your oversize jeans the next day,” he said. “This is about style as a way of being.”

Tweed states its own case surprisingly well. “The Victorian era was about a very trim silhouette and form, and I’m seeing tweeds that are cut that way,” Mr. Brewer said. “Tweed looks very elegant, but it’s a very sturdy fabric, so you can be dapper and still appear manly and rugged.”

As always, the look works only if you don’t go too far. In “Sherlock Holmes,” set in 1880s London, the detective, played by Robert Downey Jr., has a penchant for over-the-top disguise. But Guy Ritchie, the film’s director, so admired the more dignified threepiece tweed suits created for Holmes’s sober sidekick, Watson (played by a mustachioed Jude Law), that he asked the costume designer Jenny Beavan for some of the fabric so he could have his own made.

It is worth noting how well 19thcentury elements fit into the modern wardrobe, especially since many of them - peacoats, vests, fedoras - had a revival or two in the 20th century.

And as formal as some of the attire may seem, most of it goes surprisingly well with the 19th century’s most enduring fashion legacy, a special kind of trousers invented in California by a man named Levi Strauss. Maybe you’ve heard of them?



PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID SOKOSH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES / Men’s fashions from the Victorian era - bowler hats, henley undershirts, woolen trousers and military-style overcoats, and the like - have made a comeback.