Suit Alterations
Toronto

The first step of your suit alterations is to visit our store in Toronto and to try both the jacket and pants. To ensure that you end up with a perfect fit, it is really important to bring with you the shirt you would normally wear and your shoes so that your pants can be tailored to the precise length.

To make it fit perfectly and make sure it looks great, we should focus on five areas of suit alterations. The shoulders, the collar, the waist, the sleeves and the pants. 

A great-fitting suit or tuxedo jacket is a delicate balancing act between the shoulders, chest and arms. The padding in the shoulder should align with your shoulder and create a straight line from the collar to the sleeve.

In other words, if the suit jacket is too wide, then the shoulder doesn’t fill out and if it is too narrow it will pull the fabric and you won’t feel comfortable. The tight shoulder can pull across the top of the tuxedo jacket and create a gap between the shirt collar and jacket’s collar.

Without a doubt, the suit jacket’s collar can make the difference or break the look, so we need to pay extra attention to those parts.

Suit Fitting

When you return to the store to pick up your suits, you will have the chance to try it on again, stand in front of a mirror and look for final adjustments. It is absolutely necessary especially if you ordered multiple adjustments.

The suits should fit perfectly. It should lay flat across your chest comfortably without any indication of pull across your waist and should have no visible bulges or ripples in the fabric.

The dress pants should fit comfortably in the waist, the seat should drape without any pull or droop, and the cuff should fall exactly where you intended. If there are any imperfections, alert the tailor and have the minor adjustments made to perfect the suit’s fit.

Learn more about the repair process and discover the different alteration services we can offer to you. In the meantime, you can also check the 6 Rules for a Perfectly Tailored Suit.

When purchasing a new suit jacket you have to make sure that if the size is not ideal, at least it is close to ideal.

There are some parts, such as the shoulders or the length of the jackets that have many limitations such as the amount of fabric inside that is available or just can’t be altered.

These limits will tell us how much we can tailor the suit, as we have to make sure to balance the proportion of the garment and re-shape the connecting pattern pieces in order to achieve the desired result.

Jacket Shoulders

The shoulder pads in your jacket should perfectly align with your shoulders. In theory, you can extend or take in the shoulders, depending on the limitations that every jacket has. In general, the more you take-in or let-out the shoulder, the more you have to restructure the suit as it will affect the sleeves or the chest.

Sleeves Adjusting- Narrowing, Shortening & Lengthening

There is nothing worse like a shirt sleeve that has been swallowed up by an extra-long jacket sleeve or having a too-short sleeve that exposes the entire cuff of the shirt.

Your jacket sleeve must be not too long, not too short, but just right. After the alteration you will see that when you let your arms hang naturally and the suit jacket handcuff rests just above the base of your palm, revealing about a quarter-inch of your shirt cuff.

In most cases, sleeves may be the easiest part of a jacket to change and the main limitation is the available fabric in the sleeve head and the buttonholes. In order to shorten the sleeves properly, the best option is to shorten them from the shoulders, keeping this way the functionality of the buttonholes. The other option the tailor has is to shorten them from the hem. On the other hand, the only option for lengthening the sleeves is to adjust them from the hem.
Finally, as for sleeves narrowing, we have to see if the construction of the jacket allows this to be done.

Adjusting Jacket Length

It is possible to shorten the jacket by a small amount. When shortening the jacket, the most important is to keep the balance of the pockets and the bottom. On the other hand, jackets can’t be made longer, as there isn’t enough fabric to exploit.

Pant Hem

Suit pants with extra-long length will destroy your style and that is why getting your pants hemmed is something that every guy should consider. Hemming your pants is a simple and inexpensive alteration. We can ensure to get exactly the pant break you want, whether you want to lengthen or shorten your hem.

You can choose between different breaks. No break is when the hem of your pants doesn’t touch the shoe at all, the half break is if you see a slight dent in the front and the full break is if you have a noticeable dent in the front of the pants but none in the back.

Adjust the Waist & Leg Width

Your pants can be taken in at the waist easily. On the other hand,  to let out at the waist you need to take into consideration the limitation of the available fabric at the seam. To see how much room you have, just check on the inside of your pants.

As for the leg width, legs cannot be made larger, but they can easily be tapered, especially from the knee to the bottom.

Finally, depending on how much we will take in or let out the waist or legs, we might also need to alter the rise.

Alter Pant Rise

A trousers rise is the distance between the middle of the crotch seam to the top of the waistband. The rise is the most difficult to change as it requires removing the waistband and replacing the zipper as well. It’s not a common alteration, but sometimes it is an important one.