The best suits in the world?
There are some tailors who claim that they make the best suits in the world. And honestly, I do suppose that they do. I’ve seen some of it, and I would not dispute.
There are probably some readers, who believe that the next thing that I’m going to say, is that I too make the best suits in the world. But I won’t. While I’m proven to be very cheeky indeed, and I’m often -quite mistakenly in fact- taken to be arrogant (it just looks like that when I try to hide my insecurity), I seriously cannot go and state something like that.
I don’t mean to deride others at all, and if someone believes his suits are the best in the world, I guess it must be true. But what exactly makes a suit: “The best in the world?” I cannot tell you, and I am a tailor! It’s just not possible to define and qualify suits. (Sound like the art-principle again, Martin?)
For one thing, there are so many tailors and cutters and coatmakers and everything out there, it’s well-nigh impossible to decide what is ‘the best’. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Furthermore, you can’t put a qualitative norm, deciding between good, better, best etc, on something like bespoke clothing. Yeah, beacuse it IS an art.
Simply because something is made really very very well, doesn’t mean it is ‘the best’, when good/better/best is dependent on rationales that cannot be qualified. Like the type of floating canvass, for instance. If you consider a more or less rigid canvass to be the standard for a good suit, something very soft and supple will not qualify as good, let alone best. Right? If you want a suit to be very tightly cut, then a suit which drapes comfortably, isn’t up to spec.
So, now that I’ve properly confused everyone, I hope, let me get to the point. I will do this by showing you a few photo’s:
A piece of collar linen, and a piece of collar felt. These two are sewn together by hand, to form the undercollar of a coat.
An undercollar just after it was hand-padded. I haven’t touched it with the iron yet.
You see the way it won’t lay flat? I made it that way. By holding it in a specific way while hand-padding it, I create a slight tension between the two layers of cloth, which will cause it to always lay flat on the chest once the coat is ready.
The same undercollar after I trimmed it and pressed it flat.
You can see in the last picture that it seems to be flat on the table now. But the tension which I built into it is still there, and it will always stay there. This will ensure that the collar will never ever show its points turning up, as you sometimes see on coats of lesser quality.
The point of this is the following: I could just as easily have used a pre-made undercollar. It is machine padded, comes on a roll and all I need to do is cut it off and trim it. Saves me a fair bit of handwork. And I’m not saying there is anything wrong with it.
But it isn’t the best way, in my opinion. The best way is to do it by hand, like I do. And it is that way of making decisions when making a suit, that determines whether or not it will be the best in the world or not: With every stitch, every cut, and the putting on of each button, this and every other tailor, had better do it with the full intent to make that particular suit the best damn suit in the world. That is what makes bespoke, that is what makes a suit shiny or dull: The passion, the zeal, the drive to make that one top all others.
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I’m curious to know — what kind of needles do you use for your various handwork steps? As I get into needlework more and more, I realize that the right tool for the right job makes a big difference, and that is just as true of needles as anything else.
It is nice to see the shape of handmade. Machine made are rather boring. That hand one is a good example of the real thing. The middle picture is my favorite. The finished collar is what tailoring is all about.