How a bespoke garment is made

Bespoke Tailoring Process: stage one, the pattern

Everything begins on paper.

Your measurements are used to draft a pattern, which is the two-dimensional map of every piece of cloth that will become the garment. This is where asymmetry gets solved. If your right shoulder sits lower than your left, the pattern accounts for it here, and no amount of skilled sewing later can fix a pattern that ignored it.

This is the real difference between a drafted garment and an altered one. Alteration takes in what already exists. Drafting decides what exists in the first place.

Stage two: cutting

Cloth is laid, the pattern is placed, and the pieces are cut.

Two things matter and both are easy to get wrong. The grain of the cloth must run correctly through each piece, or the finished garment will twist over time no matter how well it is sewn. And any pattern in the cloth, a stripe or a check, has to match across the seams, particularly across the chest and where the sleeve meets the shoulder. Matching a check properly costs extra cloth, which is one honest reason patterned garments can cost more.

Stage three: the internal structure

This is the part nobody sees and the part that determines whether the garment is still worth wearing in five years.

A jacket needs internal structure through the chest and lapel to hold its shape. There are three ways to provide it.

Fused. An interlining is glued to the back of the cloth with heat. Fast, cheap, consistent. The failure mode is delamination: after enough dry cleaning the glue lets go in patches and the chest develops a rippled, bubbled look that cannot be repaired.

Half canvas. A horsehair canvas runs through the chest and lapel, the area that does the shaping work, with fusing lower down. It captures most of the benefit for a good deal less labour, and it is what we build as standard.

Full canvas. Canvas runs the entire front of the jacket. The most labour, the most shaping, the longest life.

In a canvassed jacket the lapel is hand-padded, meaning rows of small stitches are worked through the canvas at an angle to build a permanent roll into it. It is why a good lapel curves softly away from the chest rather than lying flat like a folded piece of card.

Stage four: the basted fitting

The garment is assembled loosely with long temporary stitches, and you put it on.

It looks unfinished because it is. That is the point. At this stage every seam can still move. We are watching how the collar sits against your neck, whether the shoulder line is clean, where the sleeve hangs when your arms are relaxed, and how the garment behaves when you sit and reach rather than only when you stand still.

Corrections are chalked directly onto the cloth.

Stage five: finishing

The garment is taken apart where needed, recut to the corrections, and sewn properly. Buttonholes, linings, pockets and edges are finished, and it is pressed. Pressing is a craft in itself: a well-pressed garment has shape moulded into it with heat and steam rather than merely being flattened.

Why any of this matters to you

If you are buying a garment because it is inexpensive, you can safely ignore all of the above and buy a fused jacket, and it will look good for a while.

If you are buying because you want something that fits properly and still fits properly after a few years of real use, the construction is the thing you are actually paying for. The cloth is visible and easy to sell. The canvas is invisible and is where the difference lives.