Phlegmatic

Long time since I bought a suit, but £3-400 sounds about right. Though I normally get a second pair of trousers, which brings it up a bit.

I should get a new suit sometime, come to think of it. The waistbands on my existing ones have shrunk a bit ;-)

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The waistbands on my existing ones have shrunk a bit

Mine have a distressing habit of doing that, too. I clearly need to change my tailor ;-)

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sigisgrim.livejournal.com

I can't see the point in spending that much money (£2K) on a suit regardless of how much money one earns. £400 is a much more reasonable top-end sum.

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What a more expensive suit will do is fit better. If it's made properly, much better.

What it won't do is last longer. In fact, the more expensive the cloth, the finer it is, and the more quickly it will wear out.

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sigisgrim.livejournal.com

The suits (and jackets and trousers) that I've bought in the up to £400 range have all fitted me perfectly well. So I can't seen the point in spending more than about £400 on a suit. Maybe this is because I'm not really a suit wearing person.

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It is almost certainly possible to get a better fit by spending more than £400. (I originally mis-typed £4500, which is something althogether different!) But if you can get a sufficiently good fit by spending £400, I am certainly not advocating that you should spend more.

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bunn.livejournal.com

I'm guessing that shape probably makes quite a difference.

I don't know about men's clothes, but women's clothes are mostly made to a set of standard body shapes and sizes. If you are shaped close to one of the standards, you get a much better range of cheap clothes that fit properly and look good on, and can easily find things to wear, than if you are a perfectly good but non-standard shape and have to scrabble among a smaller range for things that don't quite fit.

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Mens clothes are much the same. If you have the same body shape as (say) the M&S standard, you can get a pretty reasonable fit by buying an M&S suit. But a Burtons suit probably wouldn't fit you as well.

I've got a weird shape, and can't find an off the peg suit to fit me.

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ladyofastolat.livejournal.com

I'd have thought that women had... well, that they had more variables. Though I suppose that men have to add neck size, which isn't usually an issue in women's clothes.

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A good made to measure suit will allow for lots of variables. Which shoulder is higher than the other (it may only be by 1/4 of an inch, but you've probably got one). Which arm is longer than the other (ditto). Are your calves thicker than average? Etc.

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bunn.livejournal.com

Don't see why. Ok, they have no tits*, and their hips aren't so bulgy but they still have variable bums, bellies, backbones, shoulders, chests, arms, leg lengths etc...

*well actually I suppose some of them do...

Many men seem to go with the bumless wonder body shape which must pose a challenge to the trousermaker. I remember in particular someone's brother at college whose jeans were a mystery to all - how did they stay up when he was basically so... peg-shaped?

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I used to have a book that included brief excerpts from a 19th-century book on tailoring. Progressively more demanding tasks were "suit for man with tin leg", "suit for man with crutch", and "suit for man with two crutches".

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I've only ever had one suit wear out - usually they go out of fashion before that. Having said that, I'm obviously not in a high wear environment (see kargicq's post below).

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I have had several pairs of trousers wear out. One pair finally went while I was wearing them in the office ...

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Please tell us where exactly they wore out...

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He told you, it was in the office :-)

My trousers tend to go in the seat. I think I squirm around in my chair a lot - especally since the firm disposed of my comfy reclining one on the grounds that it wasn't ergonomically designed, and replaced it with a properly designed but rather uncomfortable one that gave me a bad back.

Certainly my feet fidget - I've often found my feet tangled in cables when I try to stand up, though I got round this by taking the doors off my cupboard to make a false back for the desk :-)

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Oh, and I had an old suit go at the edge of the left-hand trouser pocket. I realised that the winding knob on my watch was wearing away at the fabric every time I put my hand in there, so I switched the watch to my right wrist and haven't had a problem since :-)

Well the only problem is that if I do put the watch on my left wrist I end up walking in widdershins circles, as the extra ounce or two throws my balance out subtly... :-D

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Is your new chair properly set up? The standard JOLF chair is really a very nice (and quite expensive) one that is adjustable in all sorts of ways, but in my experience*, most people don't know how to set it up properly.

* Plymouth office health and wellbeing adviser

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Oh, that was many chairs ago. The new ones are acceptable, but still not as good as my old non-ergonomic one.

The one that gets me is the chair that has a recline lever just under the front of the seat. So when you tuck your legs under the seat for a change, your calf hits the lever and the chair suddenly falls backwards...

They may be ergonomically designed in some respects, but in others they're just silly :-)

The main problem I have with ergonomic chairs is that the idea seems to be that they're infinitely adjustable to be be very comfortable if you're sitting perfectly still in the approved typing position, but are entirely unable to cope with the idea that you might actually move occasionally :-)

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My suspicion is that they asked partners, not employees.

I'm sure you are right.

how much do you typically spend on a suit

This varies considerably, but my last four suits have all been more than £400, but less than £2,000.

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adaese.livejournal.com

The last one was a noticeably better fit - when Wellinghall tried it on, my reaction was "Wow". Which is not how I normally react to an ordinary man's suit.

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I feel we need to hear more about this suit that so enflamed your passions...

So, where did he get it, single or double-breasted, colour, lining, etc?

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I got it from Souster & Hicks, a tailor based in Woburn (as in Abbey). It is a mid- to dark- grey (lighter than charcoal grey), with either a heavy pinstripe or a light chalkstripe, depending on how you look at it. The lining is a silvery-grey, with grey and white stripes in the arms.

The suit is single breasted (all mine are at the moment, but I have had double breasted suits in the past, and I own a double breasted blazer), two button, three piece (with an extra pair of trousers).

The cloth is quite heavy in weight (11 / 12 oz, I think, equivalent to 80s), which makes it too warm for summer (except the summer we've just had), but which also means it was cheaper (this is a relative term) and will be longer lasting.

http://www.sousterandhicks.com/

Edited Date: 2008-10-08 01:58 pm (UTC)

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Do you know of these people?
http://www.goldings.co.uk/

Clare Associates client (our only client with a royal warrant) and based in St Albans.

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No, I don't; thanks.

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Prompted by this, I have decided to run a quick (and equally unscientific survey) among men at JOLF to determin how much they typically pay for a suit. So far nobody has come close to matching wellinghall let along the 'average PwC man', and that's in a survey going up to director level.

The cheapest so far is £70. And that was from a manager! (Admittedly a famously scruffy one.)

I suppose a follow-up question for regular suit-wearers is: How many suits do you have in your regular rotation? I have I think four regular suits plus another two that I would only wear in summer. I throw away older ones.

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I have the same; four, plus two very light-weight ones for summer.

Of those four, the newest I am currently keeping for "best", but it will at some stage get down-graded to "every day". One is older than the others, and only comes out of the wardrobe when it needs to.

I also have two jackets and three pairs of trousers that I wear sometimes, when I haven't got any meetings etc scheduled for the day. I also wear these out of the office (as, indeed, I do the suits, but only for special occasions).

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Two, each with two pairs of trousers. I only wear them at work when I have a client meeting coming up, which is perhaps once or twice a week on average. I can go a month without needing one, then in a busy period need it nearly every day. Musch less now I'm not supposed to be client-facing, of course.

The jackets get worn for about two and a half hours a day, most of which is commuting - they spend all day hanging up, then worn for the first 2 minutes of a meeting before being put on the back of your chair. They're nearly as useless as ties :-)

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skordh.livejournal.com

I used to spend £10-£20 but that was when Polly was dragging me into lots of charity shops all the time, so I just saved a lot of cash by picking up suits. They often fitted me better than shop-bought ones. (All that charity shopping was good for my book collection too). Recently I have been buying M&S washable suits for about £150 (I think). They save money on dry-cleaning.

Tight? Moi?

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ladyofastolat.livejournal.com

Oh, how disappointing. I read your last bit as "Tights? Moi?" and thought I'd stumbled onto another Men's Suit Secret.

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OK, £10 is the new low.

Wellinghall still has the high, including my JOLF survey.

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ladyofastolat.livejournal.com

I certainly hope that these expensive suits were multi-coloured, encrusted with jewels, and had magic pockets of holding, capable of holding an infinite number of expensive fountain pens.

Clearly I'm the wrong sex to understand the intricacies of suits, but surely they're all made of the same type of material and cut in more or less the same shape, so what do you actually get for an expensive one? I can see how made-to-measure would be a good thing, but beyond that...? I suspect there are secret Suit Mysteries that you men are inducted into in mysterious ceremonies that involve strange things being done with braces and tie-pins.

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kargicq.livejournal.com

At any one stage I have about 3-4 suits (one being summerweight, although in Newcastle that's a moot point) at about 70-100 quid each, and a couple of work waistcoats at 20-50 each. I get through about a suit a year (the weskits last longer) -- my teaching-style actually involves a lot of physical movement, and I rarely sit down. There's also a lot of dirt around schools; even without chalk, marker-pens generate lots of fine particles and anything more expensive would be a complete waste!

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The key benefit is if / when you get made to measure.

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Yeah, I mean I appreciate that there is a fair amount of skill going into a proper bespoke suit, but really - should one pair of trousers and a jacket really cost as much as two high-end PCs? I mean you can buy a pretty decent car for that much!

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A great deal of highly skilled labour goes into a bespoke suit.

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But not that much for a semi-bespoke suit though. And assuming we're talking Saville Row here, £2,000 is I suspect semi-bespoke rather than bespoke.

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