BY DESIGN : Suits, Glorious, Suits : They’re no mere clothes, an art critic says. They can turn a man into a work of art.

Anne Hollander is mad about suits.

Other people may dismiss them as dreary symbols of conformity, the predictable retreat of the terminally unimaginative. Not Hollander. In her new apologia, “Sex and Suits” (Alfred A. Knopf), the art critic contends that the suit is nothing less than an aesthetic triumph, a grand design that continues to please hundreds of years after its invention.

In Hollander’s besotted view, the tailor does what the personal trainer may not be able to: make every man look like a hero--wide of shoulder, narrow of hip, noble, rational, modern and, above all, sexy.

As Hollander explained in an interview from her home in New York City, she has always been an admirer of a properly cut suit, even the widely vilified pin-striped, three-piece kind. As a student at the Cleveland School of Art in the late 1940s, she learned to love the way well-tailored clothing seemed to give men a second, better skin.

“Among the persons in clothes I couldn’t get enough of,” she said, “were men in suits.” Her colleagues may have been gaga for the nude, but the young Hollander always understood the erotic superiority of the clothed, especially the suited, male. She relished the look of a clad arm flung over a chair, the sinuous line of a trousered leg, the way a flexed knee caused good wool to drape. “I did hundreds of drawings of men making . . . wonderful wrinkles,” she recalled.

The ancient ancestor of the modern suit was the suit of armor, Hollander explained. Until early in this century, women wore clothes that denied the reality of their bodies. They have been segmented like wasps, turned into facsimiles of sailing ships by billowing skirts, had their breasts rearranged, even flattened out of visual existence. At times men’s bodies have also been disguised, but at some point late in the 16th Century, men invented for themselves the ideal garment, one that enveloped the body but visually enhanced it in the process, suggesting all the wonders that were underneath the costume without emphasizing the inevitable flaws. The suit, the glorious suit, was born.

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Despite its titillating title, Hollander’s book is really the story of the evolution of modern dress, the subtitle of the book. You can’t talk about fashion, Hollander said, without talking about both men and women. Western fashion has always been about the interaction of the sexes, and the suit is no exception. It never existed in a gender vacuum, she said.

Whether or not you accept her theses, much of the pleasure of reading her book is in the factoids. Hollander tosses out wonderful tidbits about that vastly interesting subject of what we wear to rip out the hearts of the people we want to go to bed with.

She tells us that the parts of early suits rarely matched, for instance, and that those in which jacket, trousers and vest were all made of the same fabric were known as “a suit of dittoes.” She also disseminates information previously known only to “Jeopardy!” champions, such as the fact that the tape measure was invented circa 1820 for the sole purpose of advancing the nascent ready-to-wear industry.

Like Hollander’s landmark 1975 study, “Seeing Through Clothes,” the new book reflects her conviction that pictures--paintings, movies, even MTV--have always influenced how we view ourselves.

“This is one of the foundations of Western civilization,” she said, a perceptual truth that dates to the ancient Greeks. “We need realistic representations to believe in our own existence.”

It is no accident, she said, that the mirror is framed, just as a picture is. “We invented the mirror to help ourselves measure up. We put something like a picture in there and try to resemble it.” The picture of what we want to look like precedes the reality: “That’s why we frown when we look in the mirror.”

Fashion is an art, not a designers’ plot, Hollander said, one that has been linked with the other visual arts for millennia. Our politics and economic views may influence how we regard what we and other people wear, but the pleasure we take in fashion--our lust for certain garments and a certain look--is determined largely by an internalized aesthetic shaped by paintings, advertising art and other pictures.

In Hollander’s view, images of model Claudia Schiffer loom larger in the scheme of things fashionable than whether interest rates rise or fall or whether American values are leaning left or right. Art matters, she insisted. “People look at each other with such things in their mind’s eye. This I believe.”

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Hollander’s conviction that art and clothing have intimate ties was confirmed by her study of art history. The serious student of costume must study art if he or she wants to appreciate clothes in their context, she said. “In order to study the history of clothing, you are absolutely in bed with the history of art. You’re not going to get anywhere looking at surviving shreds.”

Evidence of the durability of suits--a term Hollander uses as shorthand for all of tailored menswear--is the eagerness with which women appropriated them. She is not surprised that the 20th Century has seen the closing of the traditional Great Divide between women’s clothes and men’s, not just in the flourishing of masculine-inspired couture by Coco Chanel and others but in such ad hoc proof as the universal swiping of boyfriends’ shirts.

Suits have an eternally flattering “abstracting quality,” she said. “Look what they do for men.” How does the suit work this potent magic? “It only refers to what is under it. It doesn’t outline what’s under it.”

Hollander is rhapsodic on the superiority of suits. Consider the bad old days when women teetered on high heels, under headdresses that looked like chandeliers, steering skirts the size of small buildings. “You didn’t have your body at all,” she lamented. “You were an upholstered sofa in Shakespearean times. And now here you have the nude body made out of wool.”

In a suit, she said, “You are a work of art as you walk around.” Specifically, you are a work of modern art, all pleasing planes harmoniously arranged. Most important, she noted, “You are also a work of sex.”

In her view, the suit is the perfect uniform for the scrimmage of appetite. And yes, she wears them, although she also likes very feminine clothes because of her full bust and small waist.

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Many men admit that they love their suits, but they often have nothing but vile things to say about its common complement, the tie. Hollander will have none of this talk about the tie as the work of the Antichrist. She conceded that for some the tie “suggests oppression, repression, suppression, depression and constriction.”

But stop your whining, she said, and appreciate the tie in all its phallic splendor. “The tie is the great flourish and marvel that finishes off the suit,” she said. “It’s the perfect accent under the face and above the bod.”

She has no sympathy with people who hate them. The ability to appreciate cultural resonance is evidence of one’s humanity, she said, “and the ability to overcome discomfort shows you are a grown-up.”

One of the glories of the tie, she added, is that it has no real purpose. “It’s all pure pleasure.” And it is most definitely not the work of the devil: “It’s the work of Mercury, which all fashion is--the god of swift changes.”