Creative Destruction

I’ve mentioned that I bought a great suit from Michael Andrews Bespoke before.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that when I ordered my first set of shirts, the first version that came in wasn’t quite right. It fit better than any shirt I’d ever worn before, but apparently it has some ill-fittingness that I could not discern. So he said, “we’ll make you a new one” and let me have the “bad” one. So I got two copies of the same shirt, one fitting better than the other, but both of them great shirts.

Then today I went in to buy a few shirts (due to the internship at Morgan Stanley!) and get my suit altered, because it felt like it needed a little change. Apparently, however, it needed a bit more change than it really was able to handle. Turns out that in the process of making it, because there is a bit of a lag between China and here, my body shape changed between measurement and the suit arriving. So some alterations of significant were required. Now, due to more body shape changes my suit needs even more changes, and the limits of the suits alteration capacity has been reached. Of course I don’t know the difference, so he could have easily just made a few little alterations to fix the glaring changes, but no, because it had to be perfect, he said he’d just have it remade.

CrossFit: my tailor’s worst enemy, and his best friend. Sucks for him to have to remake the suit all the time, but free alterations only last a year, so I’ll have to buy a new suit fairly regularly. This new Morgan Stanley job isn’t a suit every day job, so maybe I can get by owning just 2-3 suits, which won’t be that bad, if I have to buy that many new ones every year.

While we’re on the subject, I may as well talk about pants. I ordered a bunch of dress pants from Bonobos and they arrived today. Unfortunately the 28″ is a bit too tight now, so I have to reorder with the 30″. Hopefully those will not be too loose. I noticed during this order, that I hadn’t noticed earlier, that different styles are sized slightly differently. The “Black Flags” that I have are sized slightly big, so the 28″ Black Flags are more roomy than my 28″ Clean Slates, which are sized slightly small. The 28″ Clean Slates are too tight on me now. I was hoping that the 28″ dress pants which are all sized “true” would be ok, but unfortunately they were a bit too tight. They were ok, but I figured if I would be wearing them all day long, being more comfortable might be worth a little sacrifice in terms of appearance. We’ll see how the 30″ pants fit. I ordered a couple of their awesome cashmere pants and a couple straight wool pants, but realized that the cashmere pants are way too warm for the summer. So my replacement order is just a bunch of regular wool dress pants– which has the added benefit of being cheaper so I could purchase five pairs of pants now for the price that the four pairs I ordered earlier would have cost.

So at this point my signing bonus is spent.