Should a jacket’s shoulders fit first? – Reader question

What do you think of the shoulders? Wool suit - Suit Supply

Joe wants to have his suit altered: I’ve often heard people say that if you are buying a ready-to-wear suit and intend to get it altered to improve the fit, you should look particularly at how the suit fits across the neck and shoulders. Is this true and if so, why?

Yes, that’s a good guideline Joe. And the reason is that the neck and shoulders are the part of the suit that it is hardest for a tailor to alter. Or, to put it another way, most tailors will not refuse the work but it is the task most likely to find them wanting. So it is the riskiest alteration for you to request.

Alterations tailors (which most tailors are now, particularly in the US outside the major cities) regularly shorten the length of trousers and take in the waist. The first doesn’t even require the opening of a seam; the second is a simple opening of the waist seam at the back for a few inches, and closing up.

They will also regularly have clients that want the waist taken in on their jacket. Most ready-to-wear suits are made deliberately larger than average in this department, anyway. That alteration requires the two side seams on the jacket to be opened – which means unpicking the lining and making sure they get the angle of the alteration even as it narrows towards the scye and the hip. But it is a regular procedure and not that technically difficult.

Next on the sliding scale of difficulty is probably shortening the jacket’s arms. This can be done one of two ways – either from the cuff or from the shoulder. The latter is far harder as it means detaching the sleeve, shortening it and reattaching. But it is the only option if the jacket has working buttons on the cuff. If the buttons are purely decorative, the sleeve can be shortened from the cuff and the bottom button simply shifted to the top of the row.

So this is technically more difficult, and should be something you think about twice if the jacket is a bespoke or high-grade Italian one. They are more likely to have a sleevehead that is substantially larger than the armhole it goes into, so the alterations tailor will have to repeat the process of easing in the excess material when he replaces your sleeves. Not to be trusted to someone whose prime business is dry cleaning.

But while that alteration requires greater skill, it does not require much in the way of artistry. The tailor is simply attempting to rewind and then redo an existing process. Altering the neck and shoulders is different – it’s a case of figuration.

This is the term for modelling a suit to your physique. Not simply getting the measurements right, but knowing how to pitch the sleeve differently to cope with your posture, or allow more fullness on one side of the back to deal with a prominent shoulder blade.

When a tailor cuts the length of the collar of your suit, so it fits more snugly on your neck, he has the potential to alter all the figuration. Opening the back seam can unbalance one side or the other, pull the front parts of the jacket apart or ruin the pitch of the sleeve so that it hangs forward from your body.

For a good tailor, it is not difficult. But there aren’t many of those around. To be safe, make sure the suit you buy off the rack fits well on the neck and shoulders. And then have everything else altered.