How Should a Suit Fit?

As a bespoke tailor - and you’d think I'd know a thing or two about suit fit - it fascinates me that most men don’t actually know whether a suit fits them properly or not, and I don’t mean that in a patronising way because why would they? Unless you’ve spent years fitting people and looking at bodies and shoulders and posture and all the odd little things every single one of us has going on, you’re really just working on whether something feels vaguely right and whether it looks acceptable when you stand in front of a mirror, and most of the time that’s enough to convince you that the suit “fits fine”.

There are often several things someone doesn’t spot, think about or even know to look for, and the most common problems I see start with the jacket because that’s where so much of the fit is decided. I’ll see collar roll, which is that crease of fabric underneath the collar at the back, breaking in the chest because the shoulder inclines aren’t correct for the wearer, one shoulder dropping more than the other, sleeves breaking because the person naturally holds his arms back, jackets that are too short or too long, sleeves that are too long or too short, and then I’ll get down to the trousers and they’re twisting on the legs, the waist is too big because the guy had to go up a waist size just to get his thighs in, or if he’s very slim the trousers are hanging off him and almost always the trouser length is too long anyway.

I always tend to look at the shoulders first because if they’re wrong they throw everything else out, and this is where a lot of men get confused because they’ll look at the chest or the waist and think that’s where the problem is, when actually the jacket is being pushed and pulled out of shape from somewhere higher up. If you’ve got square shoulders there’s almost always a big fold of fabric across the underside of the collar at the back because you’re effectively lifting the jacket up, and if you’ve got very sloped shoulders you’ll often get breaking through the back at the point where the armhole meets the back panel, then lots of break lines in the chest and waist at the front, so what looks like three or four separate problems is really one thing creating a knock-on effect through the whole coat.

And that’s why I don’t really buy into these very generic “your suit jacket should fit like this” guides where somebody gives you five rules and that’s apparently job done, because proportion matters and people are different. A jacket should almost cut someone in half at the hem line, but if you’re a short guy then maybe that proportion needs to be 45/55 in favour of the jacket being a little shorter, whereas if you’re tall and you’ve got shorter legs maybe you want to bring that closer to 50/50 to make the legs look longer, and if you’re tall with long legs then you can probably afford 55/45 in favour of the jacket being slightly longer. You can’t really separate jacket length from the person wearing it because the whole purpose is to make that person look proportionate, not make every jacket hit the same arbitrary point.

Sleeve length is easier because there is a fairly reliable visual point I use, which is just above the break of the wrist, basically where your hand becomes your wrist, and that should give you roughly a quarter to three-eighths of an inch of shirt cuff showing. If you’ve got much more cuff than that the sleeves are too short, and if the jacket sleeves are covering part of your hands, then they’re too long, which sounds obvious when I say it but I still see it all the time, particularly with off-the-peg jackets where somebody has bought the size that fits somewhere else and just accepted everything that came with it.

And that’s really where off-the-peg suit fit starts becoming a compromise, because the suit isn’t made for you, it’s made for a broad idea of somebody vaguely like you.

Take trousers, for example, because I don’t think most men are standing in a shop thinking about rise or seat shape or thigh balance, they’re just trying pairs on until one seems to work. If you’ve got big thighs you quite often have to jump a waist size just to get your legs in, but now you’ve got a waist that’s too big. If you’ve got a flat seat you end up with what I call saggy nappy syndrome, where there’s all this fabric bagging around the back and through the thighs. If you’ve got a prominent seat you often end up doing the same thing in reverse, going up a size just to get your bum in and then having this massive gap at the back of the waistband, and if you’re short you’ll often end up with trousers that are too long in the rise and too long in the leg, so instead of helping you look taller they make you look messy and even shorter than you actually are.

The jacket has exactly the same problem. A guy with broad shoulders often has to go up a jacket size to accommodate them, which then leaves the chest and waist too big and the whole thing looks shapeless, while another guy goes the opposite way and buys a size smaller because he wants the waist to look fitted, but then the jacket’s too tight across the back. Someone with a big chest can end up with bowing through the lapel area because the chest pushes the upper part of the coat away from him, and at the same time it pulls the front of the jacket up so the coat looks shorter at the front than at the back.

This is also where the whole idea of “fitted” gets muddled up with “fits well”, because guys in very tight suits often think they look good and, to my eye anyway, they almost never look relaxed. The tightness of the suit starts affecting their posture, the way they stand and even the way they move, because the garment is constantly pulling or resisting somewhere, and once that happens you notice the suit more than you notice the person wearing it.

A great-fitting suit should feel like an afterthought.

You put it on, you look in the mirror, you can see that you look great, but physically you shouldn’t be particularly aware of it. Every movement you make, the suit moves with you, nothing fights you, nothing pulls and nothing pushes, and it literally starts to feel like a second skin. I’ve had clients I fitted at home on a Saturday morning who then forgot they were wearing the suit and rushed out the door to take the kids to football, which always makes me laugh because that’s exactly what I want the garment to do. It should make you look your best without demanding any attention from you, so you can focus on whatever it is you actually need to be doing that day, and really the only time your suit should come back into your thoughts is when somebody compliments you on it.

That’s also why I don’t put much faith in the size written inside a garment.

No off-the-peg or factory-produced suit is going to fit a wide range of people perfectly because there’s no such thing as a normal or average person. These garments are made to fit a wide range of people approximately, and that’s fine because that’s what they’re designed to do, but if you’ve got a dropped shoulder, raised shoulders, forward pitched shoulders, an S-curved spine, forward hip position, bow legs, a prominent seat, a flat seat, or any of the hundred other things that make a body yours rather than somebody else’s, then a factory pattern is always going to be making compromises somewhere.

I’d include made-to-measure in that as well, and even bespoke if the tailor has mis-measured the client or set the pattern up incorrectly, because the label doesn’t magically guarantee fit. The difference is that with proper bespoke tailoring, I can work with the person standing in front of me, rather than trying to make him fit a predetermined block.

I’ve had so many clients tell me they bought a ready-made suit or jacket in an emergency and they could immediately feel the difference between that and anything I’d made for them, and often it makes them realise for the first time just how second-skin-like a good bespoke garment is compared with something they’ve

bought off the peg. You don’t really know what you’re missing until you’ve experienced it, and once you have it’s quite difficult to un-feel the difference.

Now, can an off-the-peg suit be altered to fit properly? Sometimes, yes.

If you’ve bought something a size too big, a good alterations tailor can usually do something with it because there’s fabric to work with and you can reshape the garment. If you’ve bought it too small, forget it in most cases, because off-the-peg suits often don’t have much inlay in them to let out. Manufacturers have to save money and order the least amount of fabric they can get away with, so the extra cloth a tailor would traditionally leave inside simply isn’t there.

And if you’ve got any fairly prominent body characteristics, then it’s not going to take some cheap, quick alteration to get the suit looking anywhere close to perfect anyway, because at that point you’re not really altering the garment; you’re trying to re-engineer something that was never balanced for you in the first place.

If you’re trying a suit on in a shop and you don’t have a tailor there with you, I’d actually start before you look in the mirror and ask yourself how you feel.

Do you feel awkward? Do you feel uncomfortable? Does something feel a bit off even though you can’t quite explain why? If it does, I’d listen to that, because clothing is quite good at telling you when something isn’t right if you stop trying to persuade yourself that you like it.

My clients try on one of my bespoke suits for the first time and quite often almost gasp because they can’t believe how light and weightless it feels, and there’s really no substitute for something that’s been made for you. Once you’ve done that little feeling test, then look in the mirror and ask some very basic questions. Is fabric pulling anywhere across your body? Are the trousers bunching up at the bottom? Is the jacket hem so short that your bum is exposed, or so long that you can’t really see your crotch? Is there a big fold of fabric underneath the collar at the back? Are your sleeves covering any part of your hands? You don’t have to understand pattern cutting to spot those things.

And I think this is probably where I wander slightly away from pure fit into something I see men doing with clothes generally: following fashion instead of working out what actually suits them.

Big guys trying to look slimmer buy skinny suits or suits that are too small with narrow lapels because they’ve been told that slim equals slimming, and quite often it has exactly the opposite effect. Thin guys trying to look more muscular buy suits that are too big or go double-breasted because they think more cloth somehow means more presence, and they just end up looking like they’re drowning in the thing.

You’ve got to work with your own proportions.

If you don’t know what those proportions should be, then get help from somebody who does know, whether that’s a stylist you trust or a tailor like me who can look at you properly and guide you through the styling rather than simply selling you whatever happens to be fashionable that season. Following fashion for the sake of it is often a fool’s errand because sooner or later you end up with a wardrobe full of things you can’t wear, either because they’ve dated, because they never suited you in the first place and you only noticed once the fashion changed, or because you put them on six months later and think, “what on earth was I doing?”

Whereas if you choose suits and clothes that suit your body type and proportions, feel like you, are effortless to wear and make you look like the best version of yourself, then it doesn’t really matter what fashion is doing because the clothes still work on you. That’s the kind of wardrobe I want my clients to have because that’s where you start investing wisely for the long term instead of replacing things every couple of years because some new silhouette has arrived.

And yes, fit changes the way other people perceive you too.

“You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression” is an oldie but a goldie and there’s a reason it’s lasted, because if you want to be perceived as a competent, confident person who knows what he’s doing and is a safe pair of hands, then the way your clothes fit does matter.

But I’d probably argue that how they make you feel matters just as much, because wearing clothes that don’t fit properly makes you a fidgety, nervous and irritated version of the person you actually want to be. You’re pulling your jacket down, adjusting your waistband, pushing your sleeves back, wondering why something feels wrong around your shoulders, and none of that is helping you be the calm, confident, got-his-shit-together version of yourself you were presumably hoping to present when you put the suit on in the first place.

For me, that’s how I know a suit fits properly.

You put it on, you look in the mirror and like what you see, then you almost forget about it.

It moves when you move, it works with your proportions rather than against them, nothing feels like it’s fighting you, and you can go about your day without thinking about your clothes at all.

Until somebody tells you how good you look, obviously.