Suits me
Fraser Nelson
For a brief spell in my youth I used ‘suit’ as a term of abuse. I used to conspire with my friends to arrive at a bar ‘before the suits arrived’ by which I meant the identikit office workers who I felt drained any bar of its ambience. Since becoming one of them myself, suits have wreaked their revenge. I have been obliged to wear one every day and have never found one that didn’t make me look like a Russian conman. It seemed to be a lifetime’s punishment for just a brief period of juvenile humour.
My problem is structural. I have the wrong body for suits: a thick neck, short arms and what one tailor diplomatically called a ‘prominent seat’. My body has grown in precise two-inch bursts, which are exactly out of synch with the clothes sizes in shops. My chest has gone from 37 to 39 to 41 inches — missing jackets sized 38, 40 and 42 inches. The old sales nonsense — ‘it will shrink with use’ or ‘you have space to grow’ — have for years been my excuse as I walk out of the shop with a suit looking as uncomfortable as it feels.
Also, I have long been a victim of the law which pretends the size of your neck is directly proportional to that of your arms and waist. For most humans, this just ain’t so — which is why so many men have to undo their top button, or (in my case) walk around in shirts that look like tents.
But after getting married last month (I wore a kilt, and even that didn’t quite fit) I decided it was time to confront my sartorial demons and have a suit made to measure. Still unable to face the cost of a Savile Row suit — some £2,000 or more — I booked the return leg of my honeymoon via Hong Kong to visit their tailors, whose reputations are second only to those in London and who charge about one fifth of the price.
Walk about Brixton late at night, and peo ple offer you drugs (or worse). It is to Hong Kong’s credit that its social pest is young men chasing Westerners down the street touting made-to-measure suits which will take six hours to make. As if to compensate for my years of dishevelment I went for three suits by separate tailors: the famous Sam’s Tailor, Ash Samtani, who is next door to Sam, and a chap named Tai Cheong who was recommended by my hotel. Their prices for a suit with two pairs of trousers was, respectively, £420, £380 and £110.
I had suspicions about Sam (who wasn’t in the shop). His fame, I suspected, was based on the fact that ‘Sam the Tailor’ is easier for Westerners to say than ‘Tai Cheong the Tailor’ which was why his suits cost four times as much. His shop walls were plastered with what seemed to be recommendations but on further inspection were cordial letters of thanks for unsolicited gifts. One was a news report relating that a shirt Sam sent to the Duke of Edinburgh was blown up as a suspected IRA bomb.
The only document Tai Cheong had on his walls was a list in Cantonese offering locals even cheaper prices than he quoted me. He asked me to choose from Chinese, Italian or British fabrics, and I asked what was best. ‘Chinese, of course,’ he said. ‘Better and cheaper. But foreigners like their own, I don’t know why.’ So I went native, was measured at 10 a.m. and asked for a second fitting at 5 p.m.
Mr Samtani blanched when I told him his suits were four times the price of Mr Cheong’s. ‘He probably makes them in mainland China,’ he said — this, apparently, is a bad thing. In his youth, he won the record for making the fastest bespoke suit: 1 hour, 50 minutes and 2 seconds. My linen suit would take two days, and he persuaded me to buy shirts while I waited. In London, bespoke shirts cost £80 each with a minimum order of five. In Hong Kong, it was £80 for five shirts.
During my second fitting at Sam’s, my heart sank. The material I had chosen from a postcard-sized book had looked suitably understated: a grey cashmere-wool blend with a tiny blue pinstripe. But when I tried on the half-woven suit jacket I saw to my horror that the material was woven in such a way that it becomes massive stripes. To boot, the jacket looked like a box. ‘Can’t you make me look thinner?’ I pleaded. I mean, isn’t the whole purpose of a bespoke suit to draw on the wearer a physique he does not possess? Sam’s men grumbled, and said they’d try to taper it a little more. But the trousers, for the first time in my life, were perfect.
Mr Samtani, too, had produced an alltoo-faithful replica of my natural contours. ‘I can see the disappointment in your face,’ he said, before I opened my mouth. ‘But we can do it. We’ll pull out the shoulders a little, take in the waist.’ He worked his magic, and it was ready for collection three hours later. Mr Cheong, by contrast, produced my dream suit. The fabric was a wool-synthetic mix, but the genius of the new Chinese textile firms meant it felt as comfortable as cashmere. The cut beautifully concealed all evidence of London lunches. Had I not just ordered three suits, I would have happily ordered three more — for £15, he’d post them to London. But Mr Cheong, like all Hong Kong tailors, keeps the measurements on file and can dispatch more suits on request.
Even after a few cleanings, all the suits are in robust form and the shirts iron as well as they fit. Predictably, I’m regretting all those years I reckoned I was too junior to be expected to look good and wish I hadn’t laughed off that Donald Trump quote: ‘Don’t dress for the job you have, dress for the job you want.’ The moral in my case was to dress for yourself — not for the shopkeepers who ordain that men come in only eight sizes.
Sam’s Tailor, Burlington Arcade, 92–94 Nathan Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Tel: 00 852 2367 9423; www.samstailor.com.
Ash Samtani, Burlington Arcade, 92–94 Nathan Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Tel: 00 852 2367 4285; www.samtani.com.
Tai Cheong Tailor, 11 Hillier St, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. Tel: 00 852 3579 2058; www.yp.com.hk/taicheongtailor.
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