How Should a Groom Choose His Wedding Suit?

I saw some wedding photographs recently that made me quite cross.

I should probably clarify immediately that absolutely nothing was wrong with the wedding. Everyone looked very happy, the setting was beautiful, and I’m sure they had a wonderful day, but unfortunately, after nearly 24 years of tailoring, I’ve become almost incapable of looking at a photograph of a man wearing a suit without looking at the suit, and this particular groom had been badly let down.

His jacket had been tailored so short that his backside was completely exposed, his trousers were too long and collapsing over his shoes, the sleeves looked disproportionately full compared with the rest of him, and I found myself staring at the photographs thinking, somebody actually fitted this man. Somebody stood in front of him, looked at the jacket, looked at the trousers, presumably made some alterations and then, at some point in the process, decided that was finished.

Maybe the groom loved it. I hope he did actually, because he’s the one wearing it and my opinion doesn't matter one bit compared with his, but I still couldn't help feeling annoyed on his behalf because unlike the suit you might wear to work on any given Monday, this one is going to follow him around for the rest of his life.

Those photographs aren't disappearing.

They'll be framed in his house, his parents will have copies, they'll sit in an album somewhere, probably appear on social media every anniversary and, thirty years from now, his children may well be laughing at everyone's hair while he’s still there in the middle of the photograph wearing that same jacket.

And I suppose that's what started me thinking about wedding suits again, because for something we're going to preserve quite literally for generations, men can be surprisingly relaxed about sorting out what they're going to wear.

Not all men, obviously. I've got grooms who come to see me very early (2026 has been a great year for this actually!) and have already thought about practically everything, but I've also had that phone call which begins, “Hi Roberto, I'm getting married in three weeks...”

At which point I'm usually wondering what exactly you'd like me to do with this information.

When Should You Start Looking for a Wedding Suit?

If you've found this article because you're getting married and wondering when to start organising your wedding suit, my answer is probably earlier than you think.

Not because I want you spending twelve months obsessing over lapels. Please don't. There are enough things involved in organising a wedding without turning jacket styling into a six-month research project.

I want time because I want to understand the wedding before we start designing what you're going to wear, and that means I'd much rather have the first conversation while we still have choices than meet you when we're already racing a deadline.

A wedding suit shouldn't really exist in isolation from the wedding.

Which brings me to Danny and Priya.

Daniel Vina came to see me because he and Priya were getting married in Asturias on 14 August, and as I normally do when I'm making a wedding suit for a groom, I spoke to Danny first and then asked if I could speak to Priya.

I've done this for years, and every so often I can hear the surprise and confusion in a groom’s voice when I ask to speak to his fiancée, which I can understand because technically he's the client standing in front of me and I'm supposed to be making his clothes, but I'm not dressing Danny to stand on his own against a white wall while everybody judges his suit.

I'm dressing him to stand next to Priya, and that changes things.

I want to know what she's wearing, where they're getting married, whether it's inside or outside, what time of year it is, what the bridesmaids are wearing, what the flowers look like, how formal the wedding feels, and, importantly, what she loves seeing him in.

I also quite like knowing what she doesn't want him wearing because sometimes that gets us to the answer needed remarkably quickly.

So I spoke to Priya.

She told me she loves Danny in green. She also likes him in charcoal and generally prefers him in darker, deeper colours, and she was pretty definite that she didn't want him turning up in anything light.

Excellent. That's all very useful information for me.

Your Wedding Suit Has to Belong to Your Wedding

Then I started learning about everything else they had planned.

Priya was wearing an off-white Rosa Clará Vieri dress with lovely pearly details running through it; the bridesmaids were going to be in deep wine or burgundy, somewhere in that rich reddish-purple family, and Priya was quite set on having deep red roses running through the floral side of the wedding.

The wedding itself was going to be relatively intimate, around 65 to 70 guests, and the ceremony was planned for outside in Asturias along a long narrow gravel path with trees curving inwards around it, which sounded wonderfully romantic when Danny described it.

There was also a Plan B inside an old stone Asturian building that had once been some sort of palace or noble residence, because despite the wedding being in Spain, apparently nobody had been sufficiently optimistic to assume the weather would definitely cooperate.

And gradually I'm starting to see it.

This is the bit of making wedding suits that I particularly enjoy because I don't normally have some fully formed outfit sitting in my head from the moment somebody walks through the door. I don't think that's how this should work.

I listen, you tell me things. Your fiancée tells me things.

We talk about the venue, the season, what you normally wear and how you want to feel on the day, and somewhere during all of that a picture starts forming.

Danny wanted a three-piece suit, for example, which made complete sense for the romantic, classic feel of the wedding, but I needed to think about something else because Danny wears suits every day for work.

That can actually make choosing a groom's suit slightly more complicated, not less.

If you rarely wear tailoring, putting on a beautifully cut three-piece suit already feels like an occasion. If you spend Monday to Friday in a suit, I need to make bloody sure that when you look at yourself on the morning of your wedding you don't feel as though you're about to chair an important meeting.

I still want you to look like yourself, obviously. Your wedding day seems an odd moment to experiment with becoming somebody completely different. But there needs to be enough distance between the groom and your professional self for this to feel special.

And we had another fairly obvious consideration - Asturias. 14 August. Three-piece suit. You can probably see where I'm going.

There would be very little point in me making Danny look magnificent if he spent his entire wedding day slowly cooking inside his own clothes, so weight, construction and comfort had to be part of my thought process from the beginning.

The suit needed to look like a proper three-piece wedding suit without feeling like Danny was wearing half his wardrobe at once.

Why We Chose a Deep Green Three-Piece Wedding Suit

Eventually, all those little pieces of information led us towards this beautiful deep green three-piece suit.

And I loved it because the more we developed the idea, the more it felt like it belonged specifically to Danny and Priya, rather than simply being a lovely suit Danny happened to wear at their wedding.

Priya had already told me that she loved him in green, so we're starting from something we know she loves seeing her future husband wearing rather than me deciding that green happens to be fashionable this season.

But then put that deep green alongside her off-white Rosa Clará dress, and it creates this wonderful contrast which allows her dress to stand out rather than having Danny disappear into something pale beside her.

Then add the flowers. Priya wanted those deep red roses, and somewhere while we were putting everything together I started thinking of Danny's green suit almost as the rose stem, with the deep red of the petals coming through in his accessories representing the flower itself.

Now, I appreciate that sentence written down risks making it sound as though I was trying to dress the poor guy as an enormous rose - I wasn't! This was much subtler than that.

The deep green gave us this rich base which worked beautifully with the romantic setting and contrasted with Priya's dress, while the deep red accessories connected Danny back to the flowers and those wine-coloured bridesmaids without everybody looking as though they'd been issued a colour chart and ordered to coordinate.

That's an important distinction for me because I don't particularly like wedding outfits that look aggressively matched.

You know the sort of thing where every man has exactly the same coloured tie as every bridesmaid's dress and the pocket squares match the table decorations, and before long the groom appears to have been dressed by the events company, not the tailor.

I want harmony rather than uniformity. Everything should make sense when you see the wedding photographs without necessarily being able to identify immediately why it makes sense.

And with Danny, it totally did.

What Should a Groom's Wedding Suit Actually Achieve?

The photographs arrived after the wedding, and I was delighted with the end result.

Actually, I was probably sitting there looking at them for longer than was strictly necessary because this is the moment where all those conversations you had months earlier suddenly make sense. There's Priya in the dress she'd described to me, there's the bouquet, all the colours and the setting and, standing next to her, there's Danny in the suit we'd created from those conversations.

He belonged there.

And then he sent me a message.

“Hi Bobby, wedding was amazing, and the suit was unreal! Absolutely loved it. So comfortable, I wasn't too hot, and everyone loved it and complimented it so, so much.”

Obviously, I was delighted with “the suit was unreal”.

I'll happily take everyone complimenting it, too. I'm a tailor; I'm not going to pretend compliments about my work are somehow beneath me.

But I was almost equally pleased with: “I wasn't too hot.” Because we'd thought about that!

Months earlier, sitting in London talking about an August wedding in Asturias, we'd thought about how Danny would actually feel wearing a three-piece suit throughout the day rather than concentrating exclusively on how it would look in a photograph.

That's really important because I don't want you spending your wedding day thinking about your clothes. I want you to think about your clothes (preferably well in advance!).

I want to worry about whether the jacket is the right length, the trousers sit properly, the proportions won't make you overheat, whether the colour sits well alongside your fiancée's dress, and whether the whole thing makes sense in the place you're actually getting married.

You should be left thinking only about the person standing next to you.

What Colour Suit Should a Groom Wear?

I suspect quite a few men arrive at articles like this looking for a definitive answer, and I'm afraid I'm going to be slightly annoying because I don't think there is one.

Navy can make a wonderful wedding suit, as can grey. So can black in the right circumstances, or brown, cream, green and plenty of other colours depending on the wedding and the man wearing them.

Danny's suit wasn't green because I believe all grooms should wear green. It was green because Danny should wear green to marry Priya at that wedding. That's a completely different thing.

Had Priya told me she hated Danny in green, we'd have gone somewhere else. Had they been getting married in a completely different setting, perhaps we'd have gone somewhere else. Had Danny not wanted a three-piece, or had the flowers, dress, and general feeling of the day been completely different, all of that information would have pushed us in another direction.

That's why I find some of the generic advice around wedding suits slightly frustrating. Search online and you'll inevitably find somebody telling you the five wedding suits every groom should consider or the colour every groom is apparently wearing this year. Fine.

But you're not marrying “this year”. You're marrying one particular person on one particular day in one particular place. Surely we can be a little bit more thoughtful than that.

Don't Leave Your Wedding Suit Until the Last Minute

Which brings me back to those photographs I saw of the other groom and why they annoyed me.

I don't know when he bought his suit. I don't know who made or altered it, so I'm not going to invent a story about how it happened. But I do know that when you're making wedding clothes properly, time is useful.

Time allows us to have the conversation before making decisions. It helps me understand what your partner is wearing, rather than discovering it when the photographs appear. It allows us to select fabric intelligently for the season and location.

It allows fittings to happen properly and gives us the opportunity to look at the whole outfit rather than discovering three days before the wedding that the trousers aren't behaving themselves.

And perhaps most importantly, it removes one more thing from that slightly frantic period immediately before you get married when, from what my clients tell me, approximately seventeen people suddenly need an answer from you about something you thought had already been organised.

If you're getting married next year, you don't need to know exactly what you want before you come and see me.

Actually, I prefer it when you don't.

Tell me about the wedding, tell me about her. Or him.

Tell me where you're getting married, when you're getting married, what the place looks like, what you're planning to do afterwards, what you normally wear and whether the thought of wearing a suit fills you with excitement or fear.

Then let me speak to your partner if they're happy to be involved; we'll work the rest out.

Because when the photographs arrive afterwards, I don't want to see a man in a generic wedding suit. I want to see you.

Just the version of you who looks completely at ease standing next to the person you've chosen to marry.

And preferably with your backside covered.