Men are notoriously averse to shopping. Who can blame them, given the gantlet of women’s fragrances, makeup and handbags that confront them at the entrances to many stores and malls?

So why do men appear to be shopping for themselves in record numbers?

Men’s wear sales are surging at double-digit rates. Suits, sports coats and outerwear, nearly all bought by men themselves, are leading the gains, according to Steve Pruitt, founder of the fashion and retail consulting firm Blacks Retail. Blacks projects that men’s suit sales will be up 10 percent this fall and holiday season, and sports jacket sales will be up 11 percent, while women’s ready-to-wear sales remain flat.

“Men are the new women,” Bret Pittman, director of J. Crew’s Ludlow Shop in TriBeCa in Manhattan, told me when I stopped in recently for a tour of the new store, the prototype for a line that will feature men’s suits and tailored clothing.

      

Entering the store is like stepping onto the set of “Mad Men” or “A Single Man,” the film-directing debut of the men’s wear designer Tom Ford. Millard Drexler, chief executive and chairman of the J. Crew Group, showed me around, pointing out a vintage Mies van der Rohe black leather sofa and a Marantz sound system from the 1960s. Some weathered military file cabinets and an assortment of hardback books completed the retro look, a not-so-subtle reminder of an era when men looked sharp.

Mr. Drexler, who is known as Mickey, was wearing 484 Selvedge jeans, a white cotton Thomas Mason shirt, a navy Ludlow blazer, and brown Crockett & Jones wingtip shoes, all from J. Crew. “It’s a uniform,” he told me. Even so, Mr. Drexler has recently had to refresh much of his wardrobe. “Men’s styles are very slow to change,” he said. “But I walked around New York and I saw all these young guys wearing skinny lapels and narrow ties. I came back and looked in the mirror. My lapels looked freakish.”

Mr. Drexler and his design team set out to reinvent the suit. “What does a modern guy want to look like?” he asked. “We went to people we admire. How were they dressing?” What he and his team discerned was a once-in-a-generation change in the basic shape of a man’s suit, from a boxy design meant to conceal the body to a fitted look meant to reveal it.

The Ludlow suit was born: slim, fitted, with narrow lapels. “It’s our version of the iPhone,” said Mr. Drexler, who sits on Apple’s board. “We wanted it to be simple, consistent, iconic, with great attention to detail. Use the best fabrics. Don’t charge what name designers charge. And why does buying a suit have to be so complicated? We basically sell one model. That was the vision.”

Like Apple, J. Crew controls both the manufacture and the distribution of its clothing. Suits sell from about $500 to $1,500. “The Ludlow shop was a hit right out of the gate,” Mr. Drexler said. “Guys want their own space. They don’t want to walk by the perfume counter.” As a private company, J. Crew doesn’t disclose sales figures, but a spokeswoman said men’s wear accounted for 24 percent of the chain’s sales and was growing.

In contrast with J. Crew, the upscale department store chain Saks Fifth Avenue offers a vast array of men’s wear on two full floors of its flagship Fifth Avenue branch. Options range from private label suits starting at around $900 to the hand-tailored Italian Kiton brand, whose suits go for about $7,000 to well over $10,000. I met Eric Jennings, a Saks vice president and director of men’s fashion, on the seventh floor.

“Older suits made men look like executive fat cats,” Mr. Jennings said, as he guided me past boutiques featuring brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Zegna and Isaia, to name just a few. “Men today are exercising. They’re more slender. Clothes are showing their physique. Even the classic lines are slimmer.” Mr. Jennings himself looked very fit in a Burberry suit with a trim silhouette, vest and narrow lapels that he’d just bought. “The fabrics don’t change,” he said, pointing to the classic gray flannel of his suit. “But the fit does. If you’re wearing a suit from four years ago, it’s dated.”

What about men who aren’t fit, or are even overweight? “If the suit is well cut, anyone looks better and slimmer than he would in one of those voluminous suits with pleats that tried to cover things up,” Mr. Jennings said.

      

Men’s wear sales have benefited from a new generation of designers who made their name in men’s clothing: Mr. Ford, formerly at Gucci and now with his own label; Thom Browne, who introduced the retro-schoolboy look; John Varvatos, whose designs highlighted the male physique; and Hedi Slimane, who championed the superslim profile while at Dior Homme and designed Brad Pitt’s wedding suit. While their runway designs may have been too extreme for the average male shopper — “No one’s going to come out of J. Crew looking like a fashion victim,” Mr. Drexler said — their influence is apparent.

“The more mainstream, better men’s wear designers have had to follow their lead,” Mr. Pruitt, the consultant, said. So have the media. In the recent James Bond hit “Skyfall,” Daniel Craig, as an aging but muscular Bond, wears the new look: “The suit is seductively tight, for starters, and moves like a second skin,” Manohla Dargis observed in a film review in The New York Times. The stodgy bureaucrats, by contrast, are in wide lapels. Mr. Pruitt also pointed to “Mad Men,” the Emmy-winning series about a Manhattan advertising agency in the 1960s, as an important influence. “ ‘Mad Men’ made people understand that the slim suit is a cool thing.”

      

“By contrast, there’s really no excitement in women’s fashion,” Mr. Pruitt said. “There are some beautiful things, but no new designers to speak of, and no must-have items.”

Max Wastler, 31, lives in Chicago, where he writes a blog, All Plaidout, and runs Buckshot Sonny’s, an online sporting goods store, with his business partner, Joe Gannon. He recently acquired his first suit, a made-to-measure model from Oxxford Clothes, named “1220” for its Chicago headquarters address on West Van Buren. Navy, trim-fitting, with a high arm hole, side vents and plain-front trousers, it could easily have come from the “Mad Men” set.

      

“I’ve been spoiled by the semicustom fit,” Mr. Wastler told me. “It fits perfectly.” Having had no suit in his previous casual wardrobe, he now wears the suit at least twice a week and pairs the jacket with jeans on weekends. Now he wants another. “I desperately want the suit worn by Cary Grant in ‘North by Northwest,’ ” he said. “Dark gray flannel and a perfect fit.”

Why is he wearing a suit, when he’s mostly self-employed and doesn’t have to? “Look at all the people passing through the airport in flip-flops,” he said. “My age group looked around at the lazy way people live their lives. There’s a backlash. We were raised by a generation of men that did everything they could to escape the culture of dressing up. I think many of us are yearning for something better. The vast majority of us are only now discovering how to tie a bow tie and how a pair of pants looks with no pleats.”

Mr. Pittman, the J. Crew manager, said that a younger generation of men had realized that “women like men in suits,” adding: “These guys are doing the research, they’re reading men’s lifestyle and fashion blogs, and they’re doing their own shopping. They’re not intimidated.”

Mr. Pruitt agreed. “There’s definitely a generational thing going on. The boomers’ kids are the most brand-conscious group to ever hit the planet. Fashion to them is very important. They want to look good. Young men are buying suits, suit separates, jackets. They’re wearing bow ties and short pants. There’s tons of fashion going on.”

As I learned, it’s not just the young who are having to reassess their wardrobe. While I was at the Ludlow Shop, Paul Bowden, 48, emerged from one of the fitting rooms wearing a tuxedo shirt in size medium, rather than his usual large. “This shirt is right off the rack and it fits better than custom,” he said. He should know, since he had his shirts made in Hong Kong for the 25 years he worked as an investment banker in emerging markets.

“I’m not a fashion person,” he said. “I need guidance.” He said he met Nick Lewis, a personal stylist at the Ludlow Shop, in August. “He got me into a medium, which is a radical shift for me. He steered me into a narrower profile. It makes you look fitter, trimmer and younger.”

While I was at Saks, I asked Mr. Jennings what I should be wearing, and he steered me to a Ralph Lauren Black Label suit jacket in black wool with high arm holes and a very trim fit. “You’re not going to want to take this off,” he said, as I wriggled into the snug jacket. “It seems tight at first, but the higher arm holes actually make movement easier and more comfortable.”

He was right — it felt and looked great. I ended up buying it.

It also made the year-old suit I was wearing, not to mention the rest of my wardrobe, look hopelessly dated.