“Buy it big enough to fit a jumper under it.” So said a man working in a shop on Mount Street recently. We were staring at coats together because I couldn’t understand why a coat that fit my shoulders perfectly kept trying to turn me into McNugget. He sold me one size larger. I wore that coat four times. Realised I looked like I was wearing the pint-sized sibling of my actual coat and donated it as-is to a charity shop. Tags still not fallen off.
That didn’t just suck, it was coat-sizing wrongness of the specific brand that’s quite easy to fix if someone speaks up at the right moment.
Here’s the thing nobody mentions, not when you’re wearing flip flops in the changing room wondering why every coat is huge but also small, not on the size guide on the website, not in one of those smug Facebook groups where everyone’s spent £900 on a coat but think they were too cool for an actual tailor.
Getting a coat to fit is two separate issues. Everyone talks about them like they’re one problem. Combining them is how you end up resembling the padded-cloud look in the Richmond roofers’ video. Fitting the shoulders and frame is one. Everything under that is the other. Get either completely wrong and the whole thing is garbage, even if the other bit is perfect.
The shoulder seam doesn’t care about your jumper
The shoulder seam is the single measuring stick on a coat that cannot possibly be corrected later. This, by the way, is what Mount Street bloke should have mentioned before imparting whatever coat-sizing life advice he keeps in reserve for shoppers who stay fucking talk to him. The shoulder seam needs to hit your shoulder exactly. Not an inch past it, not “sort of there” – it needs to sit across your shoulder from bone tip to bone tip. Is too far forward? There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not like the waist of a trouser or the bottom of a sleeve. You can’t “let out” a coat’s shoulder and have it still look right, not without unpicking seams and redoing every aspect of the fit up to the armpit. Short of that, there is no fix, and any tailor who suggests there is is either clueless or deliberately taking the piss.
A lovely tailor in Marylebone showed me this when I took my poor excuse for a coat into his shop to see if there was any hope. He spent three minutes looking at the shoulder seam on this thing before shaking his head and saying “that seam’s sat on your fucking bicep mate. Nothing I do fixes that.”__
It’s why sizing up in coats is the worst coat-related advice. Wearing a jumper that’s too big just looks like you’re relaxed. Trousers that need a belt just looks like you like a lot of mobility in your clothes. But getting the shoulder seam wrong on a coat changes not just your silhouette, it throws off your proportions. Makes your shoulders narrower than they actually are, adds bulk to your torso by topping out too low on your shoulder, and then throws your sleeve length all out of whack because someone’s obviously got longer arms than you. To realise how much that messed up my coat experience I needed someone to hold it up next to me while I was wearing a coat that did fit me properly, and when I saw that side-by-side the disparity wasn’t slight, it wasn’t medium. It was everything about me telling myself this thing looked OK was lying.
This also why the actual rule, the secret nobody said to me but every tailor will advise if you let them chat to you on a coat fitting is that you fit for the shoulders first and fit them exactly. If the shoulder doesn’t fit on the rack in that shop, it never will. Everything else is negotiable one way or another. Sleeve length can almost always be trimmed by a tailor who knows what they’re doing. Even adjusting the body width of the coat is possible to some degree, if the coat comes with enough fabric margin in the seams to play with. But that shoulder, that’s where you start. If it doesn’t work nothing else will, not because it’s slightly inconvenient but because it actually doesn’t fit.
THEN you have to actually think about what’s underneath it
Got your shoulders sorted? THEN you start thinking about your layers underneath, and this is where that guy on Mount Street wasn’t wrong, he was just WRONG. Coats do need room for what you wear under them. Ask any tailor. Part of fitting a coat properly is knowing what you’ll wear it with most often, which means yes, you do need a different coat if you want to wear heavy jumpers under coats come winter than you might if your underlayers are always thin shirts. Throw them all into one size fits all coat-sizing conversation and that’s how you end up with a coat that’s either wildly overdressed in February or hopelessly flapping on you every time it gets chilly in October.
Layering isn’t the problem, throwing half a size (or God help you, a whole size) at that problem is what makes you face the same shoulder dilemmas all over again just as you thought you’d figured out the chest measurement. Instead of sizing up across the board you want a coat that fits the shoulders perfectly but still gives you room through the chest and back to wear the things you actually wear. You know what that is? For most people it’s a shirt, and maybe, sometimes, a jumper. Not a shirt, a jumper, a gilet AND aonesize-fits-small pupper. My favourite coat right now? Fits this baseline perfectly. I can throw a chubby knit underneath and not have to strategise about how to button it up. Proof? Put it on with my favourite knit under during legitimately cold weather and it didn’t shout at me like my other coats do.
Buttons didn’t even try to escape.
If that’s not standard….
The issue with either too-big coat or the one that tight-amps up every time you suck in a lung of chilly air is they’re both wrong answers to the same question. Neither will work. One will just allow you to forget it’s wrong longer, probably until the day you put a jumper underneath it and realise your coat is actively struggling not to incorporate your entire torso into its lining as you try to get yourself zipped up. The solution isn’t buying bigger, it’s allowing enough room through the chest and back to fit layers while your shoulder fit stays true. Every coat should be checked this way. Most aren’t because no one thinks about both things at once. Shoulder fit is priority because you can’t fix it later, but if that’s right then you actually CAN plan for room so check that second. Get both right and you’ll find coats that fit you instead of making excuses for coats that don’t.
