A suit is right or wrong in seven places: the shoulder, the collar, the chest, the sleeve, the jacket length, the trouser seat and the break. Check them in that order, because the first two decide whether the jacket was cut for your body at all, and the other five are adjustments. Everything else people argue about — lapel width, button stance, how tapered the trouser is — is style, and style is a preference rather than a fault.
The shoulder seam
The seam joining the sleeve to the jacket body should land on the bony point at the edge of your shoulder, where the flat turns down into the arm. Stand square in front of a mirror with your arms by your sides and find that point with a finger, then look at where the seam actually sits.
If the seam sits inboard of it, on top of the shoulder, the jacket is too narrow across the back and it will pull every time you reach forward. If it hangs down the upper arm, the sleeve head has nothing to sit on and a soft dent appears just below the seam that no pressing removes.
Check the shoulder from the side as well. A clean jacket shows an unbroken line from the collar out to the sleeve head. A ripple or a bubble in that line usually means the shoulder was cut straighter or more sloped than your own, which is a body problem rather than a size problem.
Stop here if this one fails. Shoulder width and slope are set when the jacket is cut and they cannot be moved afterwards without taking the garment apart. A jacket that fails at the shoulder is the wrong jacket regardless of what else it does well.
The collar
The jacket collar should rest against your shirt collar all the way round, with roughly a centimetre of shirt showing above it at the back. Put the jacket on, stand normally, and have someone look at the back of your neck.
A gap between the jacket collar and your shirt — daylight you can see from behind — is the most common fault on a ready-made jacket and one of the most telling. It usually means the balance of the jacket is wrong for your posture: a forward head carriage or a rounder upper back pulls the collar away.
The opposite fault is a collar that rides up and buckles at the back of the neck, which comes from the same cause in reverse. Both are correctable at a fitting while the garment is still in pieces. Both are expensive and imperfect to correct once the jacket is finished.
The chest and the button
Fasten the top button with your arms down. The front should close flat. Look for two things: an X-shaped crease radiating out from the button, and a gap where the lapels pull apart across the chest.
The X means the jacket is under tension. Either the chest is too small or the waist has been suppressed too far, and in either case the jacket will crease horizontally all day and wear through at the point of strain. The gap means the same thing further up.
Then slide a flat hand inside the closed jacket, against your chest. It should go in without forcing and without swimming around. That gap is what lets the jacket move with you and, in this climate, what lets any air move at all. A chest cut skin-tight is uncomfortable in Phuket within about ten minutes of leaving an air-conditioned room.
The sleeve, and the shirt cuff
Jacket sleeve length is measured against your shirt rather than your hand. With your arms hanging naturally, about a centimetre of shirt cuff should show below the jacket sleeve — a little more or less is a preference, none at all is a fault.
Check the sleeve width at the bicep too. You should be able to bend your elbow fully without the cloth going taut across the upper arm. A sleeve that grips there will crease permanently at the elbow.
This is the reassuring section. Sleeve length and sleeve width are both ordinary corrections on a finished jacket, and getting them wrong at the first fitting costs nothing but a second appointment.
The jacket length
The hem should cover your seat, finishing roughly where your fingers curl when your arms hang straight. That is a starting point rather than a rule, because it is set by your proportions: the useful version is that the jacket should divide your whole height in a way that does not visibly shorten your legs.
Jacket length is the measurement fashion moves most. It has shortened and lengthened twice within the working life of a good suit, which is a reason to set it on your own proportions at a fitting and ignore whatever the photographs are doing this year. A jacket cut to a trend dates faster than the cloth wears out.
It can be shortened afterwards, within limits — the pockets and the vents set how far — and it cannot be lengthened.
The trouser waist and seat
The waistband should sit at your natural waist and stay there without a belt. If a belt is holding the trousers up, the waist is too big, and the cloth will bunch into folds under the buckle.
The seat should be smooth. Horizontal pulling across the back means it is too tight; loose folds hanging under it mean too much cloth, which reads as sagging however well the rest fits. Sit down in them. Trousers that are correct standing and painful sitting are cut too close through the seat and thigh, and this is worth finding out in the fitting room rather than at a wedding.
The break
The break is where the trouser hem meets the shoe, and it is decided by the shoes rather than by the trousers. Bring the shoes you will actually wear to every fitting. A dress shoe and a loafer differ by enough at the instep to change the hem, which is why the same trouser can look correct with one and wrong with the other.
A small break — a single soft fold on the front of the shoe — suits most people and most cloths. No break at all is a style choice and needs a trouser cut slightly narrower at the hem to carry it. A deep break that stacks two or three folds on the shoe reads as a trouser that does not fit rather than as a deliberate decision.
Why the fitting room misleads you here
Two things distort a fitting in a tropical climate, and neither is anyone’s fault.
The first is air conditioning. A jacket judged at 22°C indoors behaves differently on a street at 33°C with humidity behind it, and the difference shows up in the chest and the armhole first. A fit that is merely close in a cool room is tight outside. If a garment is going to be worn in this weather, the fitting room reading needs a little allowance on it — and if it is going home to a cold country, that allowance is the one you do not want.
The second is the time of day. Bodies swell over the course of a day, more so in heat and after a flight, and the waist and thigh can measure differently in the morning and the evening. Neither number is wrong, which is why a tailor takes measurements twice and why the second fitting exists at all.
Say it while it can still be changed
The most useful thing anyone does at a fitting is to say, plainly, that something is not right. Not at the end, and not politely in a review afterwards — at the fitting, while the garment is still on the table and the correction is a morning’s work.
Customers hesitate to do this, usually out of courtesy, and it is the single most expensive kind of politeness in this trade. A shop that fits properly wants to hear it: a returned or quietly disliked garment costs far more than an adjustment. Our own reviews you can check are published with the link back to each original, and the ones describing a correction between fittings are the ones worth reading, because they describe what actually happens when someone speaks up.
Which of these a tailor can fix
The rule behind this table is simple: cloth can be removed and rarely added, and structural lines do not move.
| Fit point | Fixable? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Shoulder width or slope | No | Structural. The jacket is the wrong jacket |
| Collar gap at the back | Rarely, and imperfectly | A balance fault, set when the jacket was cut |
| Chest too tight | Rarely | Limited to the seam allowance, which is small |
| Waist too loose | Yes, easily | Taken in at the side and back seams |
| Sleeve too long | Yes | Shortened at the cuff or the shoulder |
| Sleeve too short | Sometimes | Only if there is allowance turned inside the cuff |
| Sleeve too wide | Yes | Tapered below the elbow |
| Jacket too long | Within limits | Pockets and vents set how far |
| Jacket too short | No | There is nothing to let down |
| Trouser waist too big | Yes, easily | The commonest alteration there is |
| Trouser seat too tight | Sometimes | Depends on the allowance in the back seam |
| Break wrong | Yes | A hem, and the cheapest correction on the list |
Read down the No column and the argument for having something made rather than bought is already written: every unfixable fault is a line that was decided when the pattern was cut. That is the whole difference, and how the jacket is fitted here sets out where in the process each of those lines gets decided, and at which fitting you can still change your mind about it.