Choosing Suit Fabric: 5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Choosing a Fabric for Your Custom Suit

A knowledgeable and skilled tailor is trained to look for the perfect fabric when creating a custom suit. Although most of the top tier suiting wools find their homes in the UK and Italy, wools for suiting fabrics are sourced from around the world. Other natural fabrics are also considered when creating a custom suit. With options ranging from Linen and Cotton, to even a small range of luxury fibers that are much finer and softer, such as Alpaca, silk, and mohair.

Most men, and often, women will find benefit to having a seasonal suiting wardrobe – considering linen-blends for warmer months and heavier tweeds for the cold. This gives the wearer a more useful set of options, utilizing fabrics that are intended for a variety of climate conditions. That is why the first and most important question you should ask yourself when choosing the best fabric for suits is:

When will you be wearing the suit?

The idea is to pick something that you will enjoy wearing, that won’t be too warm if you’re attending the ever popular [read: awfully inconvenient] Summer wedding in Miami, or perhaps too light if you’re headed out of here to a conference in the middle of a snowy Chicago winter.

The best thing about choosing a suit fabric is that there is, mostly, no right to wrong – just different options. Isn’t it great to be a man? But we digress.

What’s the occasion you’ll be wearing this suit to? And even taking it a step further, have you considered different fabric weights?

If you’re like most men and know your predisposition to…gasp…repeat an outfit…then it’s always best to find a suit that can work for a variety of occasions and climates. Feel free to also ask your tailor about different fabric weights, such as: lightweight (under 9oz for summer suit fabric), mid-weight (around 12 oz for in-between seasons), and heavy-weight (over 14 oz for winter.) For us, we like a custom navy, wool & linen suit (best suit material for summer) – which works great for evening or daytime events. It can be dressed up or down. It’s really every man’s LDB – that’s “little black dress” for those men out there who are unfamiliar. Of course, this then already skips us ahead and covers question number four which asks, how much will you be wearing the suit?

And now that we’ve got the more functional components out of the way, if you’ve made it this far, then you’re a guy that likes a little pizzazz. So, let’s talk design and style.

Have you considered a texture or pattern?

And if you’re scared to venture out into that arena for fear of being shunned from the male community, then I call on you to please see the following images of a one Dwayne Wade – Mr. Style and Class himself, former Miami Heat Shooting Guard, forever owner of our hearts, eternal Mayor of Wade County, and current day stud muffin. He serves us: Monochromatic looks, Suit Shorts, Sequins, Tweed, Plaid, Windowpane Checks, Polka dots – you name it and Wade’s probably done it. And if we can’t look to him as our style inspiration, well then why get a custom suit in the first place?