When you have your bespoke suit made to measure, your measurements are taken and then translated onto a paper pattern.

Patterns are the difference between bespoke suits and made-to-measure suits

For bespoke suits, this pattern is made per customer based on individual sizes and wearing preferences. Think about space to move around, so you can create the ideal and desired fit. Made-to-measure works with a standard pattern that is adjusted. You will then not have the ideal fit because you have to work with fixed margins and you will lose the balance between the sizes.

A made-to-measure pattern has also already been created to create a certain pre-selected model. With a bespoke pattern you can create any model, so this also makes a big difference and opens the door to many more models and styles.

Bespoke suits offer total freedom

You can compare bespoke tailoring with having a house designed and made under 100% architecture. Total freedom. Made-to-Measure suits can be seen as housing with options to place the door on the left or right. Restrictions and adjustments unfortunately. It can be a good suit, but it will never have the fit of a bespoke suit. Nor be in the style that would flatter you best.

Bespoke suits are handmade

Especially because a bespoke suit is made by hand and a made-to-measure suit is made industrially. Just go to such a production location and you will see little of the marketing with well-groomed gray gentlemen who leisurely make your clothes with time and attention. You actually see rows of workers making your suit in an assembly line process. That ensures a different quality and hence a lower price.

We often work with customers who started with MTM suits but still have more wishes or are simply curious about what else you can achieve if you have your suits/jackets/pants made bespoke. It often starts with further adjusting an MTM suit and this is how one discovers the added value of a bespoke tailor.

In our tailor's blog post about oversized shoulders in your jacket, we talked about which points are important for a good fit in your jacket.

As discussed in the previous article, the width of side seams does not have much to do with whether a jacket appears too large, this is purely a matter of taste.

One of the things that makes a suit look too big is a sleeve length that is too long. You often encounter this as a tailor and in this blog we will go into more depth.

How do you recognize sleeves that are too long?

As tailors, we often see that the sleeve length falls on the hand and sometimes even extends over the hand with ready-made jackets.
This ensures that the hand on the eye disappears.
The fit of the rest of the jacket does not match the sleeve length and this automatically makes the suit appear too large.

If you look at the example below you will see that the hand disappears on the left sleeve (see red arrow), which has not yet been pinned off. This gives the impression that the jacket does not seem to fit the rest in terms of fit.