A Sale of Two Suits
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m currently in the market for what will effectively be my first good suit.
My fiance and I made Brooks Bros. our first stop. Sure, we had to go to the Mall of America. And sure, it’s a huge national chain. But Brooks Bros. means suits, and they would, likely as not, be a magic bullet to getting a decent suit with relatively little exertion on our part.
Dead wrong.
Things seemed to start on a positive note.
Our sales assistant, a dangerously slender young woman, was solicitous and friendly, asking about all the little details of our engagement and upcoming wedding with the air of someone who actually gave a good goddamn about it. This should have been the first warning sign, but we accepted it as Bona Fide Midwestern Kindness, and moved on to the sizing and fitting portion of the visit.
Things initially went fine. As expected, I was directed to try on various jackets and pants to figure out what off-the-rack sizes and models might best suit me. But the visit soon took an ugly turn when it became clear I was an inconvenient size.
* The things I was trying on were beginning to bear no resemblance to the suits my fiance and I had expressed an interest in.
* When we explained that we were hoping for a three-button, slate gray suit with a herringbone pattern in my size, we were told this was probably asking too much, despite the fact that the multi-universe Brooks Bros. empire undoubtedly contains 15 billion suits at any given point in time.
* A particularly cantankerous older saleslady dropped by on two occasions to a) explain to us why we wanted pick-stitching on the suit despite the fact that we didn’t like it (”it shows that the suit was hand-crafted… you uncultured retards!”) and then b) to tell us why we actually wanted a navy suit, not the charcoal gray we kept foolishly requesting.
After trying on several thousand different irrelevant suits (including one that actually fit nicely, but was apparently erroneously matched up with non-matching pants), our sales assistant all but declared herself bored with the encounter, explaining that she had to get ready for her class immediately following her shift. She did, to her credit, promise to follow up with us by phone if there was any way Brooks Bros. could bend to our impossible sartorial demands.
We left the store vaguely annoyed that the prospect of $1,000 worth of business wasn’t enough to jog the sales folks into just taking a moment to listen to us.
I’d like to pivot for a moment and contrast the hapless salesmaiden from Brooks Bros. with the tailor at Top Shelf on Lyndale Avenue.
After the MoA debacle, Becca and I decided to go in exactly the opposite direction. Brooks Bros. is huge, national, a 15-minute drive away and off-the-rack.
So we went somewhere small, local, a 10-minute walk away and made-to-measure.
At Top Shelf, our tailor — note, an actual craftsperson, not a 22-year-old college student working a part-time job — slowly walked us through the process of creating a suit from the ground up: fabric selection, painstaking (about 30!) measurements with a tape measure and different sorts of leveling devices, color and pattern selections for a custom shirt, etc. etc. We discussed every detail. He generally had a pretty good idea of where we should go, and knew the pros and cons of everything (pocket flaps? pen pocket? lapel width? collar style? button count? vents?). By the time were we through the process, I had learned more about suits than I’d learned in the previous 31 years of living, and was in fact probably ahead of the woman at Brooks Bros. in terms of raw knowledge.
And not only had my tailor been making suits for longer than I’ve been alive, he referred on more than one occasion and with a fair bit of ambiguous reverence and fear to the tailor who’d taught him as an apprentice.
He also gave us a bit of perspective on the set-up at Top Shelf.
“Three tailors upstairs and six downstairs — you’ll probably never see anything else like this as long as you live,” he said with a mixture of pride and wry self-awareness.
Getting a custom suit and shirt made will cost a little more (about 10 percent) more than buying something from Brooks Bros. But the pleasure of having a perfectly fit suit made by a guy who actually knows his business and lives around here more than makes up for the difference. In retrospect, I’m immeasurably pleased that we got lousy service at Brooks Bros., and that we walked around the corner to try something old school.
And if I’m gainfully employed by next summer, I’m getting myself a white seersucker suit made from scratch. I kid you not, folks. Just call me “Matlock.”
After Top Shelf, we grabbed pizza at the Leaning Tower of Pizza. First time I’ve ever been there. Verdict: Really good. The pizza was quite tasty, and it feels just like a pizzeria, and that’s worth a lot unto itself. I will totally be making a return trip.
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Shoulda tried Nate’s, too. Off the shelf, but reasonable in price, and great service.
You’re in a higher priced market, but I swear by the service Men’s Warehouse. Good value and nice stuff… not brooks brothers by any means, but it gets the job done for someone that doesn’t often wear a suit. But I do realize this is like comparing Macy’s to Wal-Mart.