Double Feature

"Somewhere along the line, I said, 'I think I will wear suits now.' Why? Maybe to look more like a grown-up," Anderson says with a shrug, now seated for a lunch of pasta with boar at Bar Pitti in the West Village. (The setting couldn't be more Anderson-esque: The walls of the bistro are painted a hue of buttercup. "Yellow Submarine" tumbles from a nearby speaker. If only the waiter would stride over in slow motion.)

Anderson briefly alludes to the informal dress code in Los Angeles but stops himself from bad mouthing the flip-flop capital. "And I like that wearing a suit says, 'I am professional and serious about what I do,' which may seem old-fashioned."

Beyond a signature look

Not according to Vanity Fair, which placed him on its best-dressed list in 2005. Understandably, he's hesitant to further discuss the very look that branded him more as a wunderkid than a wunderkind. Early, almost every article written about Anderson opened with a description of his shrunken suit.

"I don't really do that anymore. It just becomes a little embarrassing to become known as the guy in the ill-fitting suit," says Anderson, fluttering his tapered fingers as if to shoo away any whiff of a bad memory. Jacobs can sympathize. He also resents being distilled down to his signature sartorial accents. "I do not want to be defined by big buttons and Peter Pan collars," Jacobs says. "That's only part of what I do."

When asked about his suit arsenal, Anderson shifts and squints. "How many do I own? Um, not a lot," he murmurs. "I don't know."

What is known is that Anderson has been seeing the same New York-based tailor since the beginning: Mr. Ned on Fifth Avenue at 20th Street. There is no sign out front. A tiny elevator tootles up to the fourth floor and opens to a no-frills loft space crammed with floor to ceiling shelves of fabric bolts. Pinstripes, cashmere, tweeds. It's a veritable sweet shop for a sartorialist.

"When Wes first came to me, nobody was wearing high-cut suits with two buttons," says his tailor Vahram Mateosian, whose father was the original Mr. Ned. He has made 25 suits for Anderson. "He definitely doesn't follow trends, and he knows exactly how to translate what he sees in his head into what he wants. I haven't had any other customer who could do that." Mateosian tailored all the suits on "Tenenbaums."