How many man-hours go into a bespoke suit?

[carl browne]

On average, how many man hours does it take to make a suit?

Also, what is the cost of the trimmings, buttons, canvass, thread, etc. that goes into a suit?

Of course I know that good cloth can be relatively cheap (tweed) to spectacularly expensive (vicuna, high worsted counts, etc.)

[Cufflink79]

Not sure on the hours, but I do know a bespoke garment can take as little as 15 weeks, to over a year depending on how often you can meet with the tailor for fittings.

Best Regards,

Cufflink79

[Costi]

...or a week.
Most say between 60 and 80 hours, but it certainly depends on skill, methods etc. I wonder how this is relevant: trying to count the money in the tailor's pocket?

[carl browne]

Well, I have been giving this some thought.

Yesterday I went to a boutique in my little town and saw a $4,000.00 US cashmere sweater. It may (or may not) have been hand knitted, but very loosely and certainly would not survive more than a year or two of regular wear.

Seeing a sweater sell for more money than some of Savile Row's finest started me thinking about value.

I have an untested hypothesis that bespoke clothes are a bargain despite being rather expensive. I KNOW they are a bargain by one measure; several things are still hanging in my closet and look great after 20 years of regular wear. But my suspicion is that if I were to calculate all the very skilled work involved, I'd discover that tailors work on a pretty low margin.

Perhaps I'm just looking for an excuse for another commission. The fact is that ordering bespoke clothes is like eating chocolate bon-bons; it's hard to stop.

[carl browne]

And Costi, yes, counting money in peoples' pockets has gotten to be a habit with me. I'm a terrible Philistine and, at the risk of repeating myself, a commercial landlord. How else do I figure out how much rent to ask for?

Years of this have given me a certain reverence for what other people do for a living. I happen to like tailors, I like what they do, and I'm curious about the commerce as well as the art. As I said, I like tailors--I like them better than most commercial landlords, and they certainly seem to be far happier.

[Costi]

The 4000$ pullover is often in the shopwindow not to be sold, but to remind you what a bargain you made buying another model in cashmere for 990... on sale!
Balzac once travelled to German-speaking territories with no idea of language or the value of local currency. He got a bag full of small coins and paid for carriage by placing one coin after another in the coachman's palm. When a smile would show up on the coachman's face, Balzac would take back the last coin and that was always the right price.

[couch]

When a smile would show up on the coachman's face, Balzac would take back the last coin and that was always the right price.

But was it elegant to retract what had been once given? This seems a small fall from M. Balzac's professed standards. Surely the smile was worth the one extra coin if the knowledge gained could be used to accurately compensate the next German-speaking coachman . . . .

[Costi]

An elegant situation involving elegant characters would have been different, but the traveller probably knew coachmen would not hesitate to overcharge if given the opportunity of a foreign and inexperienced customer. Thus, when dealing with what was probably a notoriously dishonest category of people (not unlike taxi drivers in some countries today), he devised this trick to defend his pockets and probably couldn't care less what impression he made. Sometimes it's more practical not to be taken for a fool than to be thought elegant by a scoundrel

[yialabis]

my tailor says it takes him 60 hours to make the coat of a suit or a sports coat for me . I know he gets paid less than many others (in the UK and Italy)who are no better then he is, so often I give him a bit more then what he asks . That puts a greater smile on his face then the one he always has as a result of finishing a new nice coat for me . !!
I'm a lucky man when it comes to this relationship.

Vassilis

[couch]

He got a bag full of small coins

Perhaps you're right, Costi, but as I understand your telling of the story, the incremental cost of one coin was small. You have attributed to Balzac the prejudice that all coachmen were scoundrels, and a preference for not appearing "foolish" over maintaining consistency in his own behavior at minimal expense. As Michael has often pointed out, elegance consists in acting in accordance with one's own principles. Whether the coachman thought he was elegant is immaterial. Whether Balzac felt he was acting as Balzac should act--with caution, perhaps, but with generosity and equity to those who had provided him service--is what matters for elegance (or courtesy, in Castiglione's sense).

[Scot]

This thread chimes with a recent experience of my own. There is a new shop on Savile Row - Bernard Weatherill. It is still part of the Kilgour operation but there are now two shop fronts where there was once one. I went in for a nose around on Wednesday and was astonished to see READY TO WEAR sports coats priced at £1650. I recognised the cloth, I am pretty sure, as being from the Worsted Alsport book. I found myself wondering who would buy such an item when an individually crafted coat could be obtained at several nearby tailors for a very similar sum of money. There are, I suppose, a number of possible explanations:
1. Ignorance - people simply do not realise that bespoke can be an economically reasonable option.
2. The pervasive culture of instant gratification - see it, want it, have it. The idea of participating in the creation of something unique and then patiently waiting for its realisation is beyond their comprehension.
3. An obsession with "labels" as a means of asserting and maintaining status. One sees this even amongst the rich and famous, wearing designer suits that don't fit.
It's all a bit depressing if one is inclined to worry about such things. I put aside my anxiety at the time, walked a hundred yards down the row and comissioned an unlined summer blazer in Smiths Finmeresco. I expect it to cost a fraction more than the above mentioned sum

[Doug]

The statistic I have seen, and which squares with my business experience having looked at retail and manufacturing businesses, is that the cost of direct labor and materials and manufacturing overhead for tailored women's clothing is usually no more than 15% of the list retail price. It's probably a bit more for men's clothing. Say it's 20%. So let's say you pay $4000 for a suit with 60 hours of labor in it. Even if people with the high level of required skill make as little as $15/hour, you've already exceeded 20% of the cost. So, provided you see the value in the cost, bespoke is indeed very good value for money.

[carl browne]

The off-the-peg Kiton, Brioni, and Giorgio Armani suits sell for more than $4,000 US in my So. Cal. beach town. Oxxford is a little less--I suppose because it's American made. This puts them in roughly the same price range as Huntsman!

Kiton and Brioni are pretty good and Oxxford is quite good, in fact. Overpriced, certainly, but not junk. But Armani boggles the imagination. The canvass is glued, the buttons are plastic, almost everything is made by machine. The factory ought to be able to stamp one out every minute, and Armani ought to be ashamed.

There's a little known exception to the law of supply and demand; if you're trying to sell something for $100 and you can't find a buyer, try raising the price to $1,000. Some people will gladly pay that price to prove that they can, and others will be happy to know at that price they'll be among the very few who will have it.

[carl browne]

An obsession with "labels" as a means of asserting and maintaining status. One sees this even amongst the rich and famous, wearing designer suits that don't fit.

There's nothing wrong with an obsession with labels if the product backs them up. A label ought to be a kind of shorthand explanation of what you're getting--a guarantee of quality, and of rarity. Too bad that's not always the case.

Tiffany made a reputation for itself by supplying magnificent baubbles to robber barons at the turn of the last century. Now most of its revenue comes from cheap silver jewelry for middle class, suburban, teen aged girls. Yet American women everywhere still go crazy for the blue box with the white ribbon. The word "Tiffany" says "I am Consuelo Vanderbilt." What it means is, "I just got my driver's license and need a monogramed keychain for the Volkswagen."