The fitting

I inherited the shop from my father in 2011 and kept his name over the window, which is a poor commercial decision and one I would make again.

I have worked alone since Ivete retired. I make about forty suits a year, nearly all of them for weddings, and the rest is alterations: hems, waists, sleeves, men who put weight on, men who lost it, men who inherited their father's suit and want to wear it.

I close at seven. On Wednesdays I close at five, because that is the day I do the shopping.

He came in on a Monday in April, with no appointment, holding a photograph on his phone.

The photograph was of his father in 1988, in a double-breasted suit in mid-grey worsted, with a lapel too wide for any era. He asked whether I could make it the same.

I said I could and that he would regret it.

I explained what one explains: that a 1988 lapel shortens the neck, that double-breasted demands posture, and that he was going to wear this once in his life and look at the photograph for fifty years. I suggested a two-button, an eight-centimetre lapel, tropical wool at 260 grams.

He was quiet for a few seconds and said he trusted me.

A man who says "I trust you" in the first conversation is usually in a hurry. This one wasn't. He was simply tired of making wedding decisions, which I see all year round and recognise from a distance.

First measuring, Monday the fourteenth of April.

I took fourteen measurements. I wrote them all on the card, which is paper, because I tried a spreadsheet in 2016 and went back within three months.

Shoulder to shoulder: 47. Chest: 102. Waist: 92. Right sleeve: 64.5. Left sleeve: 64.

And the line that matters here: right shoulder 2 cm lower. Compensate in the canvas.

This is common. Almost everybody has one shoulder lower, usually on the dominant side, and almost nobody knows. He didn't know. When I told him he turned to the three-way mirror and stood there looking, and then said his mother had complained about it since he was a teenager and he had always thought she was nagging.

Measuring somebody takes ten minutes and requires that you touch them about twenty times.

I have done this since I was twenty-three. I have measured more than a thousand men. This is not a thing that happens to me.

Second fitting, Thursday the eighth of May, basted.

The basted stage is the ugly version. It is the piece assembled with loose white thread, no lining, no final canvas, so you can see how it sits on the body. It looks appalling and it is the most important step there is.

He came at half six, straight from work, his shirt creased from a whole day in it.

The baste was good. The shoulder compensation came out right, the sleeve crease fell where it should, the armhole was two millimetres tight and I marked it in chalk.

Then I knelt to mark the trouser hem.

Marking a hem is the only part of the job where the tailor is kneeling and the client is standing looking down. Thirty seconds a leg. I do this forty times a year.

That day I took longer than thirty seconds a leg and the reason was not in the trousers.

When I stood up he was looking at the side wall, which is where the photographs of my father with his nineties clients hang, and he was looking with the concentration of a man who has picked a spot to look at.

Neither of us said anything about it.

I wrote on the card: armhole -2mm, hem 1.5 turn, delivery 5/6.

Third fitting, Thursday the fifth of June, finished piece.

He arrived at ten to seven. I close at seven.

The suit was good. I say that with the coldness of somebody who does this for a living: it was very good. The wool fell the way 260-gram wool falls, the double-breasted he didn't have was the right call, and the shoulder compensation was invisible, which is the whole point of compensating a shoulder.

He looked at himself in the three-way mirror for a long time.

Then he said, without turning round, that the wedding had been called off on the twenty-second of May.

I asked nothing. It is not my business and I had a finished piece in my hand that needed paying for.

He said he was going to pay for it anyway, that the suit was beautiful, and that he had come because he had an appointment.

At seven o'clock I locked the front door and turned the sign round.

That is what I do every day at seven. It is also true that on that day I did it with him still inside the shop, wearing a suit I had just handed over.

The fitting room is 1.80 by 2.20 with a velvet curtain that does not quite close. The three-way mirror takes up one wall.

Getting a basted suit off somebody is quick. Getting a finished one off is slow, because there is lining, because there are six buttons between jacket and waistcoat, and because the person taking it off knows every one of them by name.

I hung the jacket on the wooden hanger before anything else. That was not professional care. It was that a 260-gram cloth creases and I was not going to remake it.

The rest was on the fitting room floor, which is parquet, and which has had a stick of tailor's chalk against the skirting since a fitting in 2019.

A three-way mirror shows you the same thing from three angles. That is what it is for. It was the first time in fifteen years I had thought of that as a property rather than as a tool.

He left at twenty past nine with the suit in its cover and the receipt in his pocket.

He came back in August to take in the waist on an old pair of trousers, and I served him, and nothing happened, and neither of us mentioned June.

He came back in November for the same reason.

His card is still in the drawer with the others, in alphabetical order, fourteen measurements written in pencil and one note underneath, in my father's handwriting, which is the handwriting I taught myself to copy at twenty-three.

Right shoulder: 2 cm lower.