Bespoke suits: a decision-making nightmare

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/10/2018 (2850 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must summon all his courage, get up off the couch and, with no concern for personal safety, perform one of the most manly activities on the planet.

For me that time came last weekend when my buddy Bob arrived at the door, pushed me into the passenger seat of his little red sports car, and drove me downtown to (pause for dramatic effect) buy a new suit.

For the record, it was not my idea to buy a new suit. I am perfectly happy with the suit I currently own, even though it makes me look like 300 pounds of sausage stuffed inside a 150-pound casing, because while my waistline and the universe are constantly expanding, my old suit is not.

My wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, insisted I had to get a new suit because while I was on stage as the MC at a recent charity event, she was busy buying tickets for the fundraising auction, which is how she managed to win a gift certificate for a made-to-order suit from a fancy downtown men’s apparel store.

I was not allowed to go suit-shopping on my own because my wife feels — and this comes from the bottom of her heart — that I have all the fashion sense of a cinder block.

Which is why she insisted that my buddy Bob — who owns more suits than any other human being I know — ride shotgun to supervise the process.

I know what you are thinking: “What’s the big deal, Doug? Basically you walk into a store, buy a suit, then walk out again.”

Ha, ha, ha. Allow me to laugh at your amusing ignorance, because in the modern world, buying a (bad word) suit is one of the most complex activities outside of high school physics.

When you walk into the store, you will be instantly surrounded by dozens of salesmen who are all (a) so thin you could slip them through the mail slot on your front door; (b) sporting hipster-style beards that make them resemble stylish lumberjacks and (c) wearing tailor-made suits that are so (bad word) tight they remind you of the Spider-Man-style Spandex costumes worn by every athlete in the Winter Olympics.

Every sales guy in the store will have a specific task. For example, one guy’s job will be to offer you a designer doughnut and a glass of scotch, whereas another will help you look through thousands of little books containing swatches of potential suit fabric, while yet another guy, armed with a tape measure, will climb all over you to determine the precise size of your medically important limbs and internal organs.

It turns out you, the innocent suit shopper, are required to make more decisions than NASA did when it was first attempting to land a human being on the moon, partly because the astronauts wore baggy space suits, whereas, thanks to your wife, you are in the market for a sexy suit that will transform you from a lumpy newspaper columnist into a reasonable approximation of super spy James Bond.

My main role was to whimper like a wounded jungle creature, thereby forcing Bob to make most of the key decisions, such as the fact I needed a “blue suit” as opposed to a standard black “marry ’em and bury ’em” suit.

But you can’t just say you want a blue suit. You have to decide which specific shade of blue you want, and there are roughly 3,200 different types of blue.

Bob decided I should get something called Oxford blue, which I would describe as being “definitely a colour in the blue family.” After picking your colour and fabric, you also are expected to decide what kind of lining you want inside your suit, if you want a slim fit or the more generous classic cut, how many pockets you want and whether those pockets will be straight or rakishly slanted, the shape and size of your lapels, what the monogram in your custom-made suit will say, whether you need just two vents in the back of your jacket or if you’d prefer three and whether you want those goofy upturned cuffs at the bottom of your pants.

Brace yourselves for a shock, because I also agreed to buy two made-to-measure shirts, even though the latest fashion trend — you will think I am making this up, but I am not — is to wear your suit without a shirt at all.

Seriously, here is what the British edition of GQ magazine has to say on the topic: “For Spring/Summer 2019, you should be wearing your suit with absolutely nothing underneath. That’s right: nothing. ”

Wearing a suit without a shirt? Again, ha ha ha! That would make me look like a gigantic tube of toothpaste with the gooey paste oozing out from a huge gash in the middle, if you catch my drift.

So after even more decisions — What type of shirt cuffs do you want? What style of collar? How many buttons? Or maybe you want holes for cufflinks? — Bob picked out a couple of shirts that will make my wife happy to be seen with me in public.

When the experience was over, I was feeling mildly stressed out, so Bob took me to a new pub and we enjoyed cold beers and bacon sandwiches.

For the record, the bacon was classic cut and it fit me perfectly.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca