Twice a week or so, a man stands in our fitting room caught between two suits. The 42 fits his shoulders and billows at the waist; the 40 fits his waist and pulls across the back. He has usually read something about custom tailoring on the ride over, and he asks about it carefully, as if the question itself might carry a price. So let us be plain about made-to-measure suits in Montreal: most men who ask about them do not need one. We sell made-to-measure. We believe in it. And we will still steer you to the rack first, because that is usually the right answer — and because a store that only ever says yes is not a store worth trusting.
When the rack wins
A ready-made suit and a good alterations table cover more bodies than the custom-clothing industry would have you believe. Sleeves, jacket waist, trouser seat, taper, hem, even a collar lift — our tailors do that work in-house every week of the year. And on a suit like the dark navy Super 110's Esprit from Jack Victor, they are working on a block cut fifteen minutes from our door, a pattern they know the way a mechanic knows an engine he has rebuilt a hundred times. If the shoulders fit, almost everything else is adjustment. The racks are at their deepest of the year right now, and a rack suit altered properly costs less and arrives in days rather than weeks. For seven men out of ten, that is not a compromise. It is the correct call.
When made-to-measure suits in Montreal earn their keep
Then there is the man the rack has never met. His shoulders are two sizes from his waist, so every jacket that fits one betrays the other. Or one shoulder sits lower than its partner — far more common than most men realize, and the reason a finished jacket can look faintly wrong without anyone being able to say why. Or he stands very straight, or stoops a little from years at a desk, and the balance of a standard pattern tips forward or back on him. A tailor can chase these problems through alterations, but there is a point where you are no longer adjusting a suit; you are arguing with one. Made-to-measure ends the argument. The pattern is corrected before the cloth is cut — the low shoulder built in, the posture accounted for, the rise where your body actually wants it.
There is a second door in: cloth. Our racks hold what we bought; the books hold more than five thousand cloths we didn't. The flannel you wanted in a shade we never carried. A Vitale Barberis Canonico twill in exactly the navy of the suit you wore to death for six years and still miss. Then the details nobody sees and the owner always knows about — working cuffs, a lining with some nerve to it, your initials stitched inside. None of this is necessity. All of it is the difference between a suit you own and a suit that is yours.
Measured on Decarie, cut in Montreal
The process is less ceremonial than the word custom suggests. You come in — with the shoes and the shirt you actually wear, please. We measure, we put you in a fitting garment, and we note the things a tape alone misses: how you stand, which shoulder dips, which wrist carries the watch. You choose the cloth and the model. For our Jack Victor commissions, the order goes to their TRU-MEASURE workshop here in Montreal — the suit is cut in the same city where it was measured, which still strikes us as exactly how this should work — and comes back in about four business weeks. Then a final fitting, and the small finishing passes our tailors would make on any suit worth the name.
The October arithmetic
Here is why we are writing this in mid-October rather than December. Count forward: measured this week, cut and sewn by mid-November, final fitting before the month is out — and the suit is hanging ready while the December calendar is still filling in. Holiday parties. Year-end dinners with clients. The January photographs that outlive the evening. The man who thinks of made-to-measure in December is ordering a January suit, and he will spend the season's best evenings in the one he meant to replace. If a date matters, the tape should meet you now, not after the invitations arrive.
Start on the rack — we mean that. Read about the program on our made-to-measure page, or book a fitting and let the mirror settle it. If the rack can dress you, we will say so and save you the money. And if it can't, you will finally learn what men with difficult shoulders eventually discover: the problem was never your body. It was the pattern.
