Why Invest In A Custom Suit (Part 1)
It wasn’t all that long ago that everything we owned was made specifically for us. Garments could have been made by a loving family member or, if you had the means, you may have contracted a cobbler in your town or city to craft a pair of shoes specifically for your feet.
The advent of the factory and assembly line changed our way of doing things. Fortunately for our quality of life, these developments lead to vastly cheaper goods. The argument could certainly be made that many of us fairly normal people have lives more comfortable than kings and queens who came before us. However, the precipitous drop in the cost of goods changed the way we view them, particularly in the world of clothing.
In previous generations, garments were carefully considered, as they were often kept and maintained for a lifetime. Soon, we shifted to a place where we might buy a pair of jeans or a t-shirt on a whim, perhaps to to keep up with the latest trends or maybe just for that fleeting dopamine rush given us by the purchase of something new.
In this new landscape, custom suits became an item for the rich, the famous, politicians and gangsters. Why would the average customer make the investment on a custom suit when they can wait for Banana Republic’s latest sale and get a perfectly serviceable one 40% off? This is not just a reasonable question, but a great one. I, for one, can relate. Before I began creating custom garments for myself, I had a few of those Banana Republic suits. In addition, I quite liked them. To answer the question of why you may consider investing in a custom suit, I will offer several answers over my first few posts.
Fit
This is often the first reason clients consider a custom garment, but fit is more comprehensive than you might think. You may have bought an off the rack suit in the past and taken it to a local tailor to have it adjusted. Altering an off the rack garment can make a world of difference and I encourage you to do so if you have a piece that is not quite right. Most American garments are quite voluminous for many of us. A little nip in at the waist along with getting sleeve and pant length correct can make the difference between looking sharp and appearing as if you are a middle schooler who has borrowed his father’s suit. While making a marked difference, these adjustments still don’t address the most important parts of a garment.
Overall, off the rack fits are designed to be passable on the largest number of bodies, not to flatter any body in particular. This is why standardized fits really work for very few clients.
As a fitter of custom garments, I take many characteristics of a client’s body into account to arrive at a fit that is not only correct, but flattering. Take a stockier client for instance. While getting all of this client’s measurements “correct,” I may stray from a generally accepted rule on length. For a broader client, it may be most flattering to cut their jacket on the longer side so their upper body does not end up appearing too boxy. It’s situations like that when it becomes clear that proper tailoring is, in fact, part art, part science. Similarly, if I encounter a client with a very broad chest and shoulders but a very small waist, I may opt to give them just slightly more room in the waist. This is to avoid giving the client a fit akin to that of Jack Skellington. If that reference is lost on you, do yourself a favor and watch The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Knowing how to work with extreme deltas between horizontal measurements of a body, along with heights that are outside of the norm is critical in creating a beautiful fit for “irregular” clients, but getting shoulder slope correct applies to every single client. Shoulder slope is often considered the most crucial element to properly fitting a suit. Everyone has different shoulder slopes, but off the rack suits are created with universal slopes. Many (myself included) have a different shoulder slope on each side of the body. These asymmetries can be created by uneven muscle development, injuries or they can even start at birth. Since a jacket effectively hangs from one’s shoulders, it is critical that the shoulder slope of one’s suit match that of their body. If the shoulders of your suit are too sloped for you (you have more squared shoulders), your shoulders will press the whole jacket up, likely causing the jacket to pop at the chest and flair out at the hips. If you have very sloped shoulders (again, I am in this category), your jacket is likely to have unsightly bunching in the areas of the chest and shoulder blades. This was one of the first shortcomings I found in my off the rack suits I once loved when I began having custom clothing made. Fitting a client with a proper shoulder slope can be a huge contributor to a magical moment when the feel the best they ever have in a garment.
Additional considerations, such as posture, continue to tell the story of how a garment should properly fit a client. When clients visit our atelier for their fittings here in San Francisco, they are often blown away by how many adjustments we notice during a fitting. For more on the details of a proper fitting suit and how differently tailored suits may complement different body types, shoot us an email or schedule a consultation with us.
Construction Quality
While producing a garment with machines certainly makes them more attainable, the truth is there is still no match for the human hand when constructing a garment. All of AYA’s garments are majority handmade. This means critical parts of the jacket such as the sleeves, collar and canvas are all hand set. The resulting garment is one that is softer and molds better to one’s body. I often compare a handmade garment to a broken in glove. It simply fits and moves better.
Unfortunately, in this analogy, the machine made garment or brand new glove simply never breaks in and feels the way a hand stitched garment does.
In addition to functionality, a garment that is majority handmade adds a bit of romanticism. On our garments, all of the buttonholes are hand sewn as well. There is a word we have taken from Italian in tailoring, sprezzatura. Sprezzatura means, in a way, studied carelessness. In classic Italian suiting, it refers to the intentional wrinkles sometimes placed in shoulder seams, along with the messier drape that a lighter weight garment may have. These intentional “imperfections” give off an air of sophistication. Handmade buttonholes have this quality. They do not look as perfect as a machine made button hole, and in their imperfections, you can see the human hand that made them. While these little flourishes may not be critical to everyone, I find that many clients appreciate this attention paid to their garments.
This conversation will continue in another post where we will talk about little bit more about construction, dive into cloths, and highlight the many style decisions a client can make when designing a custom garment. Thank you for reading.
