Clothing Alterations: How Good Is Good?

A good bespoke tailor can work miracles and save lives with a timely intervention and some expert work. A good question, however, is how do you know when expert work is expert? If there’s a tear in your suit, you need clothing alterations and your wedding is in half an hour, the last thing on your mind is likely to be how much it costs to fix, only if it can be done!

To this end, Exclusive Alterations presents a rough guide to the levels of skill and training required to carry out things such as suit repairs and clothing alterations at various levels. If your tailor is billing you an arm and a leg and you suspect that they may be overcharging, consider the caliber of professional and the difficulty level involved in what you are asking.

Basic Clothing Alterations

Basic clothing alterations are those which you may feel like attempting yourselves. Replacing a lost button or a broken zip, for example, or shortening the length of a trouser leg. These are things that in an emergency could be done by a normal person with a little practice, training or advice from a friend (or even a guide).

The most that should be attempted at this level is altering the length of a jacket sleeve; however, be warned that at this skill level, such suit alterations should only be attempted on sleeves with no lining and ornamental buttons.

Medium Level Clothing Alterations

A bespoke tailor of medium skill will be able to work on the kind of clothing alterations which subtly but directly affect the fit of the garment and the overall look of the piece. This means work like bringing in or letting out the sleeves, torsos or collars of shirts and jackets, and the legs of trousers. It also means that the tailor is able to alter higher-quality jacket sleeves which are fitted with a lining and functional buttons.

This level of clothing alterations is where the price starts to increase, but as it does so one can immediately notice the importance of the tailor’s competence in assessing the comfort of your clothes and the impact of the alterations on your whole look.

High-Skill Clothing Alterations

High-level clothing alterations involve making serious modifications to everything from the fine details of the piece, to jobs that require incorporating large quantities of fabric seamlessly to perform the task. Changing the length of the whole jacket or rotating its sleeves, reducing the shoulders of a shirt and even fixing minor damage by re-weaving (invisible mending) fit into this category.

If you require clothing alterations of this type you need not only a well-trained tailor, but you need to be sure that they know what they are doing. This is where a good relationship with your tailor, of the kind we encourage at Exclusive Alterations, really comes to the forefront. If you don’t know who’s working on your clothes, then the pride of your collection could be the first job of its kind they have ever worked on!

Expert Clothing Alterations

Expert jobs are ones where the work done is so significant, and so expensive, that you may simply want to consider a new suit instead! At this point, tailors like Richard – people on the real savile row tailor level - will really stand head and shoulders about the competition.

Clothing alterations of this significance will involve changing things which will alter the whole piece. Any jacket shoulder adjustments, for example, will deeply affect the overall look of the suit. A tailor of this skill level can also alter the entire posture of the jacket by altering the way its front and rear are connect, which may be required if the wearer suffers from a condition which causes them to stand differently.