How to Buy and Fit a Suit

How to Buy and Fit a Suit monkeysee.com See how the experts do it. Hi my name is Matt Landsberg. I’m President of Eric Finn Custom Clothiers. We make custom suits and custom shirts and a host of other custom garments for executives, attorneys, athletes, and professional entertainers. We’ve been featured in a number of area publications including the Washington Post and probably a dozen other publications and serve primarily Washington D.C, New York and Miami. Today we’re going to talk about how to have a custom suit. How to purchase a custom suit, how to have it fit well, what to look for when buying a custom suit including quality aspects of it as you choose to have something made custom how to find a good tailor and ultimately how to take care of your suit. Next we’re going to talk about and we’re going to show when ill fitting suit looks like. Here we got Bryce wearing a shirt bought off the rack that’s a little too bit big in a ways. That’s the first glaring issue I see so here he’s got all kinds of extra room and if you were to tuck it in there’ll be all kinds of blousing and it would look fairly poor. What you want to do for this is take this to your local tailor. A quality tailor that works on clothes frequently and have it adjusted. It’s not something that costs tremendously a lot of money but probably around $20 to $25 per shirt. The other thing I see here is the sleeve is pretty long on Bryce. It got a lot of extra bunching here and so you can have this shortened as well by a qualified tailor. The other glaring aspect I see is a watch. He’s got larger watch and at the cuff if the cuff doesn’t cover the watch what you can do to your tailor as well is have them take off the button and reestablish it where it’s slightly bigger so it slides over the watch. And the shoulders that fits pretty well and the neck that fits pretty well also you ideally want to get about one finger in there if it’s too tight obviously you’re going to strangle yourself if it’s too full it looks sloppy. Next thing we’ll do is talk about the suit and how it should fit the jacket, so this jacket is a whole, is just a little too big for Bryce, first thing I noticed is it’s too full in the just here so you’ve got a little bit buckling especially if he’s not standing completely straight. You’ve got all kinds extra fabric here, it’s not too bad on the shoulders but just a hair big, you might be able to see that I’m pinching a little bit of extra shoulder padding ideally, that shouldn’t be the case. The biggest and most glaring issue about this jacket is it’s got way too much room in the waist. A lot of times when somebody buys a suit off the rack it’s going to be too big in the waist, if you don’t get the quality tailor to adjust it then it’s going to be too full but again this is something that can bee pulled in on a side of the jacket. The Sleeves of this jacket are too short, you’re going to see, you can even see the button and again the shirt sleeve is too long with the jacket it’s too short, ideally what you want to show us about a ¼ inch of shirt sleeve underneath the jacket sleeve and this case again because the shirt is not coming over the top of the watch, you can’t see any sleeve at all. Again these are all things that should be considered when buying a suit and once you have the suit having them altered properly. The other thing about this jacket is it’s too long. Tailoring is much about balance and proportion the jacket should be basically, should cut the wearer in half so from behind the neck to the floor for example that 60 inches your jacket length should be about 30 inches. This one is too long and it makes Bryce’s legs a little shorter so there’s a lot of illusion there so this is one of the things where you can have a jacket short and ideally if you’re buying off the rack, you should look, you know how to look forward with the right jacket length. Next thing that’s very glaring about this and we see it frequently is the trousers he’s wearing is too long. You can see here it’s buckling both in the front so it’s not in a proper break as it should be but it’s also get a buckling. If he turns 90° here you can see how it is in the back it’s buckling and its dragging along the back. That’s another very simple thing for a tailor to fix but it’s one of those things that really needs to be paid attention too and it shows your paying attention to your polish to your overall appearance. And here we can see that the trousers are too short, some people might refer to this as high water or wearing high waters. This is one of those case is where the trousers clearly need to e lengthened and in this case a good two or three inches and here you can see from the back, how high it is. Now ideally it’s going to go basically right above the heel and once that’s corrected you shouldn’t have a problem. Now if you’re buying something off the rack and it’s significantly short like this you might want to check the inside of the trouser to make sure if there’s enough fabric where it can be let out. One last thing I’m going to show, turning Bryce 90° here is frequently in this suit particular isn’t too bad, a lot of guys you see a collar roll right here that’s another fairly easy thing to fix again however I take it to a qualified tailor and what they’re going to do is lower the collar and take out this extra fabrics so everything lays smoother on the back. Next we’re going to show how a suit should fit properly.