Is French Suit French?

Question

I've been trying to find an answer to this question and found an article by Grammar Girl where she wrote about capitalizing the 'french' in french fries. She quotes CMoS as follows:

'The Chicago Manual of Style [also] recommends keeping french lowercase because french isn’t being used to literally refer to the country.'

Even though she was writing about french fries, I believe this is a rule of thumb which applies to all such usage. So, I needed to find the origin of F/french suits so I can determine whether they literally originate or have to do with France. After a google search, I still haven't been able to ascertain the origin of F/french suits.

So, question is, which of these would be correct?

He wore a blue French suit.

He wore a blue french suit.

Answer 1

The columnist James Kilpatrick spend an entire column trying to find some rule for deciding when eponyms retained their capitalization and when they lost it.

He found not only did such a rule did not exist but that lexicographers disagree about the proper use of such well-known words as "herculean", "stoic", and "stygian".

My guess would be that it is connected with the popularity of the named item, compared to that of the namer. Who remembers, after all, the first US ambassador to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett -- so the flower he brought back from his post is lowercased. His fellow diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's foreign minister, is better known, so the improvised firebombs Finns threw at Soviet tanks are capitalized.

This shaky rule would suggest "French suit" -- since most people (myself included) have never heard of that style -- but "french fries".

Answer 2

I have made a bit of progress with this and thought everyone might benefit from the answer:

Okay, so first, I search over and over for 'french suit' until I found an online store that had product pictures of certain short-sleeved suits. Although, I didn't see the words 'french suit' there, I realized they must be the short-sleeved suits on there.

So I did another search with the question: 'Is safari suit same as french suit?' That was where I found this and this websites which throw more light on the relationship between safari and french suits (because I wondering if the inventor of safari suits was French).

Indeed, he was a man by the name of Ted Lapidus, aka the ‘poet of French couture’!

Whodunit solved!