Women's tailoring

Women’s Tailor, Chiang Mai: three measurements, one garment

Menswear tailoring is drafted around the shoulder. Womenswear has a harder problem: bust, waist and hip all have to be satisfied simultaneously, and they are independent of each other.

Ready-made clothing handles this by assuming a fixed relationship between the three and printing a single number on the label. For anyone whose proportions differ from that assumption, and that is most people, every garment becomes a compromise. Buy for the bust and the waist is loose. Buy for the waist and nothing closes.

A drafted pattern treats them as three separate inputs. That is the whole of the advantage, and it is a larger advantage than it is in menswear precisely because there are more variables that must agree.

Where fit fails, and what fixes it

Jacket gaping at the closure. Not enough bust allowance, so the front is pulled apart and the lapels point away from the chest. Solved with a properly placed dart or a princess seam, not a larger size.

Blouse gaping between buttons. The same problem in a lighter garment. Covered in detail on the blouses page.

Skirt standing away at the small of the back. Waist-to-hip difference greater than the size chart assumes. See skirts.

Trousers tight at the hip and loose at the waist. Same cause, different garment.

Sleeves too long and shoulders too wide on a jacket that fits the body. Almost universal for shorter women buying to fit the bust.

The suit

A women’s suit is the garment where all of the above compounds, because the jacket and the trousers or skirt each have to solve their own version of it and then look like a set.

Fitted properly, it is also the garment where the difference is most visible. A jacket that closes cleanly over the bust without pulling, with the shoulder sitting where it should and the waist actually suppressed at your waist rather than somewhere near it, does not look like a better version of a ready-made suit. It looks like a different category of clothing. See women’s suits.

Cloth

For this climate, lightweight wool for tailoring, silk and fine cotton for blouses, and linen where comfort matters more than a crisp line.

Womenswear also opens up cloths that suiting does not use much: silk crepe for dresses, lighter wool blends for structured pieces, and cotton for anything that needs to hold shape in heat. The fabric guide covers the trade-offs.

Bring a picture, or bring a garment

For womenswear especially, images shorten the conversation enormously. A neckline or a silhouette is instantly recognisable and difficult to describe.

Better still, bring a garment you already like the fit of. It is the clearest possible brief.