Wedding suits

Start earlier than you think

This is the honest part, and it is the reason this page exists rather than another list of lapel styles. A bespoke suit is cut, basted, tried on, corrected and only then finished. That is a sequence of appointments across days. Every shop in this city advertising a finished suit in forty-eight hours is describing a process with the fitting removed.

If you are flying in for the wedding, the first appointment should be the first thing in the diary, not a gap between other plans. Tell us the date and we will say plainly whether it is possible — including when it is not.

Cloth for a hot-weather wedding

Most weddings we cut for happen in heat, often partly outdoors, and the cloth decision is usually made in an air-conditioned room. Those two facts do not agree with each other.

• High-twist and open-weave wools: they move air and they recover
• Lighter weights for an outdoor ceremony, heavier for an evening indoors
• Linen blends where a creased look is acceptable — and we will say when it is not
• Pale colours photograph differently in direct sun than under a marquee

More on cloth and construction.

Fit, and the photographs

A wedding suit is judged from angles no other suit is: sitting, with arms raised, from behind, in close-up. That rewards a high armhole and a properly shaped chest, and it punishes a jacket that looks fine standing still in a mirror.

• Shoulder line ending where yours does, because photographs show it
• An armhole cut high enough to raise your arms without lifting the jacket
• Trousers that sit at the waist and stay there through a long day

Construction

The chest of the jacket is shaped by canvas underneath the cloth. A fused jacket is faster and cheaper, and after a season it shows as bubbling across the front — on the garment you keep because of what it was worn to. The argument is set out onfull canvas, half canvas and fused.

The wedding party

Groomsmen are the case where early booking stops being advice and becomes a constraint. Each person needs their own measurements and their own fitting; there is no version where one visit covers five people. Bring the group in at the start of the trip, not the end.

Fitting rounds

A wedding suit runs through the same stages as any other, with the last of them deliberately before the date:

1. Measuring and cloth selection, at your hotel, office or home.
2. A basted fitting on the half-made suit, where the pattern can still change.
3. Further fittings as the corrections go in.
4. A final fitting and delivery, before the date rather than on it.

How many fittings your garment needs depends on the garment and on you, and it is agreed at the first appointment rather than promised here.

The full sequence is on how a fitting works.

If you are not here for long

Many wedding suits we cut are for people in Bangkok for a fortnight or less, and that is workable — but only if the first fitting happens in the first days rather than the last. The order that goes wrong is always the one booked at the end of a trip.

Where a member of the party cannot be here at all, we can work from measurements taken by a tailor where they are, with the clear caveat that a garment cut from someone else's measurements is made-to-measure rather than bespoke, and we will say which one you are getting.

Afterwards

Your pattern is kept. That matters more for a wedding suit than any other, because it is the one people come back to have altered years later rather than replaced — and an alteration against the original draft is a different job from guessing at one.

Questions we are actually asked