Put This On

honorthytailor:

If your suit is not becoming to you, it should be coming to us…

-Honor Thy Tailor

This is wise advice.

Q and Answer: Can Wide Lapels Be Slimmed?

DT asks: Is it possible to have wide lapels slimmed?

The answer to this question, generally speaking, is yes. That doesn’t make it advisable, though.

The main reason is that it is a very time-consuming operation for your tailor, and for that reason will be quite expensive. You can also run into trouble around the button hole - if it’s a real hole, it can’t be moved. In most cases, this dramatically limits the amount of slimming one might be able to do.

So: possible, but not recommendable.

A Coat Renewed

I’d estimate that this herringbone Brooks Brothers tweed is from the mid sixties, but it could just as well be from the 80s or the 50s.  A coat like this is pretty much the same in any year.  I bought it a couple years ago at the Salvation Army for ten dollars.  The tweed was in great shape, and with a toothbrush and some Oxyclean I managed to address the bit of ring-around-the-collar that kept it from looking perfect.  Outwardly perfect, anyway.

The only problem with the jacket was the lining - in the time I owned it it went from threadbare to hanging in shreds.  I wear the coat so much that I decided it was worth replacing.

I had a scarf lying around the house that my mom had bought from an estate sale.  It was a yard square, and with a bit of measuring, I realized I could line the whole thing with the silk from that scarf.  I brought the jacket and the scarf to my tailor, and a hundred dollars later, it was completely relined. 

I think the new lining looks like a million dollars, and I’m always happy to give old clothes new life.  And - bonus - at my request he added an extra pocket for my phone. 

Q and Answer: Shortening Shirt Tails

Adam writes: I’ve found Uniqlo’s shirts fit me very well but the tails make me feel like I’m wearing a dress when untucked. Is it worth bringing a $30 shirt to the tailor to square up the tails - or does another brand offer a better option. Having not gone to a tailor yet at all, do any offer bulk pricing - say if I bring in 10 shirts to do the same thing to?

Well, as you probably anticipated, we’re generally in favor of tucking in your shirt.  It’s a cleaner, sharper look that is much better suited to layering.  If you do wear an untucked shirt, though, it’s important to wear one that’s cut to be left untucked.

If you take a shirt to the tailor, you won’t want to ask him to square off the tails - an oxford with square tails is a goofy hybrid, like those “dress sneakers,” and to be avoided at all costs.  Square tails are for camp shirts and bowling shirts and the like.  Instead, you’ll want the tails shortened, so they only extend maybe two or three inches below the belt line, rather than five or six.  The tailor will probably charge about ten bucks for this service.  (As far as bulk discounts go… you can ask if you want, but we wouldn’t.)

Is it worth it?  Well, you won’t be able to tuck in the shirts, so they’ll become strictly casual tops.  If that is worth Uniqlo price + $10 to you, then go for it.  If it isn’t, don’t.  You probably won’t find any similar shirts much cheaper than that.

Some brands do have relatively short shirt tails (this is the bane of us tall guys’ existence).  I’ve heard that Lands’ End Canvas does, for example.  J. Crew does on some shirts.  Generally, though, you won’t be able to buy those for dramatically less than the $40 you’d spend on the tailored project.

This, from The Silentist, is a nice illustration of what a little tailoring can do.  The author spent $25 at the tailor and got a whole new pair of pants.  Well done.

Time Out New York is a wonderful publication (I’m particularly a fan of the beautiful and charming Jane Borden’s comedy coverage) , but if they want to run articles about men’s style, maybe they should hire someone to look them over who… you know… knows something about men’s style. 

They just published this piece, about “bespoke” suiting in New York.(1)  The disasters are all over everywhere here.  Frankly, they’re too many to enumerate.  Judging by these photos, at least three, maybe four of these men would have been better suited with a $400 suit from some worst-case-scenario off-the-rack retailer like The Men’s Wearhouse.  This is that bad.

The lesson here is that tailors vary wildly in their abilities, their offerings and particularly in their taste.  You cannot rely upon a tailor to tell you how to style your clothes.  They are craftsmen, skilled at making clothes, not at designing them.  Find a good tailor, learn about clothes, and know what you want before you start ordering purple button holes and black wool.  Furthermore: keep it simple.  Just because you can order white-on-black Al Capone pinstripes doesn’t mean you should.

(A proviso: one of these suits, by Michael Andrews, looks fine.  It’s also possible, even likely, that many of the other problems came from the styling and choices made by the gentlemen featured in the article, rather than by some mistake of the tailors.)

(1) (I would ordinarily use “bespoke” to describe a process in which a tailor creates a pattern specifically for a customer, then makes a garment from that pattern with multiple fittings; it appears they are mostly featuring made-to-measure programs here.)