From the moment I purchase an item of clothing to when I can finally wear it out of the house, the waiting time is approximately two weeks. That’s allowing three to five business days for delivery, and another five to seven days for tailoring.

You see, at 5ft 7in, a bit of foresight is required. Clothes fit me like they fit Charlie Brown – a simple T-shirt swamps me (which I guess must be why the Peanuts character never bothered with long trousers). Of course, Charlie Brown is for ever eight years old and I’m 25. Yet I’ve never really considered myself a small man – I’m a well-balanced Libra, so a Napoleon complex is out of the equation.

I grew up with a seamstress mother, who would automatically hem my trousers up until I was 18, which is when she started shying away from touching the decidedly higher-quality clothes that I purchased with the money from my part-time retail job while at university. Incidentally, it was also around this time that I was first introduced to a tailor.

My tailor has fixed more than half the contents of my wardrobe. I trust my tailor so much that I name him as my emergency contact on administrative forms. Like Ms Marie Colvin, if something dreadful happened to me and someone was to, say, pull out my corpse from under rubble, I want them to be impressed with the narrow sleeves and neat cuffs of my boiler suit.

I can tell you now that finding a good tailor isn’t the difficult part – there’s one around every corner. But building up the confidence to pay a visit to a complete stranger with your prized possessions can be. Will they think I don’t know how to shop? Why am I spending £200 on a pair of jeans? And something he must often wonder: why is he bringing me women’s clothes?

I have found that a good tailor is like a good barber. You show them what you want and they deliver. You build a mutual trust over time. It would appear that I am not alone in my thinking. “I have [my tailor] on speed dial, I call her more than my mum,” says Ms Ilaria Urbinati, Hollywood stylist and founder of Leo Edit, a men’s lifestyle blog started in quarantine. She dresses the short kings of the red carpet and has worked with Messrs Rami Malek (5ft 7in), Aaron Paul (5ft 7in), Donald Glover (5ft 9in) and Milo Ventimiglia (5ft 9in).

The obvious presumption is that all Urbinati’s clients wear bespoke designs, which is not true. The stylist often pulls from brands’ shop stock and has a few tried-and-tested brands she goes to. “Prada is boxier and works better on shorter men, plus Dior, Berluti, Thom Browne, AMI PARIS, Paul Smith and believe it or not, SAINT LAURENT, too,” she says. But when it comes to suits on shorter men, tailoring is non-negotiable.

For years, I’ve had a phobia of suits. I’ve admired them from afar: Mr Christian Bale’s grey pinstripe Giorgio Armani number in The Dark Knight Rises; Mr Al Pacino’s three-pieces in The Godfather and Scarface; even Mr Wes Anderson’s quirky mustard corduroy suits.

Last summer, I dipped my toes into Wall Street dressing, experimenting with just the blazer at first. The image in mind was Mr Hedi Slimane’s Parisian nonchalance for CELINE HOMME, a notoriously beanpole silhouette, but one I was nonetheless keen to emulate. My own ingredients were made up of an oversized houndstooth blazer, paired with a printed shirt, blue denim jeans and Converse sneakers. The blazer was baggy, but when everything else was tailored to fit, I didn’t mind the shabby fit of the jacket, close to Mr Richard Gere’s roomy jackets in American Gigolo.

Sometimes a pinch of imperfection is endearing when it’s intentional. Standing at 5ft 5in, former French president Mr Nicolas Sarkozy is a good reference point here. At his 2007 inauguration, he opted for a black Prada suit that slouched above his Tod’s loafers and looked great.

“Length is quite a common [alternation] request,” says Ms Valli Colpani, founder of Atelier Colpani on Avery Row in Mayfair, London, who has been tweaking clothes since the late 1990s. The most frequent request is the “shortening of trousers, shirts and jackets sleeves”, she says. “Sometimes we’ve had to redo garments to achieve a perfect fit. It can all be done, but the time for tailoring can cost more than a new jacket.”

Once you get into the habit of tailoring your clothes, you automatically become a more considered shopper. Nothing is going to waste in your wardrobe and there are no duplicate items unless they’re part of your daily uniform. For me, that’s figure-hugging turtlenecks, which are great for tucking into trousers and shorts.

The mistake I’ve always made when it comes to shopping has been going to British and Swedish brands instead of the Italians and Japanese ones, which are generally better at catering to those of us on the smaller side. Snow Peak is great for technicalwear, while Dolce & Gabbana and Brunello Cucinelli are on the soigné side – their clothes come up quite snug, but never too tight, and are good go-tos when searching for something that hinges on clean-cut and casual.

To return to Napoleon, perhaps the reason for his over-aggressive behaviour wasn’t because of his height after all, but because all of the best tailors fled France after the guillotine dropped on Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI. Luckily for me, my tailor isn’t going anywhere. But even if he does, I have five rules for dressing as a shorter man that I can always lean into. These are: