Philosophical Differences

Could not resist the urge to have a couple of suits (and two blazers) made before leaving Phuket. There are a few tailor-made items in my closet that might never again see the light of day, but overall I've had great results in this part of the world. Phuket is lousy with tailors (mostly from Burma and India) and all of them are starving for business these days -- a low season on the heels of a prolonged post-tsunami (post-SARS, post-avian flu, post-9/11, post-Asian financial crisis) downturn.

For the suits, I went with a navy blue two-button and a gray three-button. The latter features a very subtle pinstriping; the former is pretty basic but I recently retired my old blue suit. As is a matter of course with any good tailor, both suits came with two pairs of pants each (pants wear out faster than suit jackets). As for the blazers, one is navy and the other is a textured grayish-brown that will look good with khakis.

Apart from our haggling over a final price (that was Step 2 in the process after selecting bolts of material), I wrestled with the haberdasher regarding fit. His seemed to be a Euro-centric sense of style and he pushed for an exceedingly form-fitting cut. He pointed to the Armani, Hugo Boss, and Versace catalogs he had in abundance to make his case. The male models therein might be six feet tall but I doubt they weigh more than 160 pounds, and I worried that the "shrink-wrap" fit that they could barely pull off would look ridiculous on me. As we continued to spar (good-naturedly), he asked why use a tailor at all if what I really wanted was an off-the-rack fit. In the end we found a comfortable middle ground, but I quietly conceded that my sense of sizing might be skewed by uniquely American concepts like "relaxed fit".

I once wrote that one cannot scale the heights of self-importance without a tailor -- and there really is no substitute for the tailor-fit experience and probably no easier way to feel like royalty.