Few words have been as thoroughly abused as “bespoke”. First used in the 18th century to describe custom-made clothes – originally corsets, funnily enough – the term is the past participle of “bespeak”, meaning something that had been spoken for. In tailoring shops along Savile Row and elsewhere, it referred to a length of fabric reserved for a single client, marked in chalk and destined to become a suit, a sport coat, or a pair of trousers shaped to their body.

Over time, however, the term has drifted from its original meaning. In Colorado, the company Bespoke Provisions sells pre-packaged sea salts and cocktail-infusion kits. In Michigan, a financial advisory firm called Bespoke Planning uses two crossed sewing needles as its logo. In Manhattan, the term has finally travelled its arc and bottomed out: a proctologist has named his health clinic Bespoke Surgical.

Companies have co-opted the term because they know people associate bespoke with quality. In a global economy where goods are made in distant factories, many of us are so removed from production that we picture our clothes tumbling out of some clothes-making machine. In this way, “bespoke” carries the residue of a slower, more thoughtful approach, where transactions happen between craftspeople and clients, rather than through factories and distribution centres. We assume a certain clothing hierarchy: custom tailoring is placed at the summit, while ready-to-wear is situated somewhere below.

In reality, however, it is much more nuanced. Today, ready-to-wear tailoring can equal – sometimes even surpass – what many custom shops can deliver. I recognise this claim may be met with scepticism. After all, you’re reading this on a platform designed to sell you designer clothes. But I’ve spent more than 15 years writing about bespoke tailoring and talking to both tailors and their customers. When readers ask me where they can get a custom suit – often for critical events such as weddings – I strongly encourage them to try ready-to-wear first.

To make sense of the matter, we should first unpack some definitions. Ready-to-wear simply means clothing made in standardised sizes – the sort you find on a rack or at, yes, MR PORTER. In the world of men’s tailoring, this production system took recognisable shape in 1849, when Brooks Brothers introduced the first ready-made suits. The system expanded during the US Civil War, as the federal government needed large quantities of standardised uniforms produced quickly. Early versions of such clothes were crude, but over the following century, production steadily improved as industrial technology and statistical modelling became more sophisticated.

A major leap occurred during WWI, when the US Army measured its recruits to improve the fit of its uniforms. These anthropometric surveys – followed by a landmark 1941 civilian study sponsored by the Works Progress Administration – contributed to the growing body of data that manufacturers used to refine standardised pattern blocks. Over time, ready-to-wear sizing systems increasingly improved through repetition and revision. Manufacturers learnt to predict a person’s proportions from just a handful of key measurements.

If ready-to-wear is about creating something for a statical ghost based on demographic data, then bespoke tailoring is about crafting something for a real and specific body. The process begins with a tailor taking detailed measurements, which they’ll use to create a paper pattern that serves as your garment’s blueprint. Cloth is then cut and roughly assembled into a provisional garment, which you’ll try on at your fitting. There, the tailor studies how the garment hangs, where it ripples and pulls, then asks for your feedback on how everything feels. Back at the workshop, the piece is taken apart, adjusted and reassembled for another fitting. This cycle repeats two or three times, each revision bringing the piece closer to its final form. In theory, you should walk out of your tailor’s shop at the end of all this looking like the best version of yourself.

Made-to-measure lives between these two poles. Rather than drafting a pattern from scratch, this starts with a pre-existing block, which is adjusted according to your measurements, so you get a personalised version of a pre-made look. And instead of three fittings, there’s only one. In this way, the business offers some of the advantages of custom tailoring at a lower cost.

It seems logical that custom clothing should fit better, as it’s made for you. If you stand with an erect or stooped carriage, a tailor can shift the jacket’s neck point so that the final garment hangs properly from your shoulders. If you carry a bit of fullness in your midsection, they can add a Donlan wedge so the jacket gently curves instead of jutting forward beneath the buttoning point. Such is the promise of bespoke – if you have a good tailor.

And therein lies the difficulty. Over the past century, the apprenticeship system has thinned and the number of seasoned tailors is considerably smaller than it was during our grandparents’ generation. In 2021, after a coat maker died of Covid, an American cutter reached out to me in search of someone to replace him. I tried my contacts and came up empty. In the end, he built a small international network, shipping cloth overseas to recreate what once would have been handled down the street. The romance of bespoke tailoring obscures how fragile the system has become.

Made-to-measure can be even more limited. Clients are typically measured in showrooms by people who don’t know how to cut or sew. The information is then sent to distant factories, where the garment is produced straight to finish by technicians who have never seen how that client stands or moves. Consequently, subtleties such as posture or sleeve pitch may go unaddressed.

More importantly, a preexisting block can only be altered so far before a new one needs to be redrawn (a process that’s often not within profit margins). If the template was designed for slim customers chasing contemporary proportions – cropped jackets and narrow trousers – it may not work for someone with a heavier or more muscular build. In theory, a salesperson would explain this and decline the order. In practice, the cost of living makes it difficult for many to forgo the commission.

Even if the company is perfect in every regard, the client can err. Maybe they admired a checked tweed in a swatch book but didn’t anticipate how brash the pattern would look as a full-body garment. Perhaps they forgot to look at the swatch in daylight, so they missed the undertones that can make a navy fabric appear purple on a clear afternoon. Or perhaps they enthusiastically choose some details – jetted pockets on what should be a country jacket – only to realise later that they were misguided. Given the costs and labour involved, a good tailor will never offer a money-back guarantee, leaving you with a very expensive, unwearable garment.

The advantage of ready-to-wear is that you can return items to the rack if you don’t like them. And if they’re well made, they will still carry many of the structural features that matter: a half- or full-canvas construction for drape and shape, generous inlays that allow the seams to be let out, perhaps even bench-made details such as handmade buttonholes, hand-shaped collars or hand-attached sleeves.

There is also a certain humility built into ready-to-wear. Talented designers create beautiful garments precisely because they know what to add and when to hold back, much like a Michelin-rated chef composing a dish. Without those guardrails, many men designing their own suits succumb to excess – contrast buttonholes, scripted monograms, loud linings – which may feel exciting in isolation but often betray inexperience.

The debate between ready-made and custom tailoring has raged on for more than 100 years. In 1931, the editors of the industry trade journal Apparel Arts published an article on the value of handwork. “In the clothing business, ‘hand tailoring’ as a term of encomium has often covered a multitude of sins,” they wrote. “By itself, it is not a self-sufficient term. It is as vague and non-indicative of the degree of excellence as the term ‘hand-painted’, which can, after all, apply equally to a Rembrandt and to a backyard fence.”

The quality of a custom suit ultimately depends on the skill of the tailor who drafts it and on whether the two of you are, in the end, a good fit for each other. Some people require custom work because their proportions fall outside industry norms. But by statistical design, ready-to-wear is built to serve most bodies. For many men, thoughtful alterations will achieve nearly the same result – and with far less risk.