Short Shrifted

Being short and living in New Jersey is something of a double whammy for Joseph Ax, a reporter for The Record (NJ’s largest daily). Like so many areas across the country, there just aren’t many clothing options among the chain and big-box stores for men who are shorter than average. In the story he ponders “Who’s Looking Out for North Jersey’s Little Guys?” and bemoans the lack of selection in suburbia:

A recent visit to the Garden State Plaza in Paramus illustrates the predicament. Ideally, I wear 30- or 31-inch pants with a 28-inseam; my dress shirt size is a 14-inch neck and a 31-inch sleeve. Yet visits to the clothing racks of The Gap, American Eagle and J.C. Penney yielded only frustration. As usual, pants and shirts were too long.

The main clothing solution proposed in the article is online shopping. Some stores may carry your size on their website even if they don’t stock it in their stores, so you should always check. Here are a couple of The Record’s online picks:

• American Eagle: XS shirts and pants with 28-inch inseams, in stores and online – but 28-inch inseams come only with 26- or 28-inch waists.
• Gap: XS and, in rare cases, XXS shirts and pants with 28-inch inseams, all online only. The 28-inch inseams come in a number of styles and waist sizes.
• Lands’ End, J.C. Penney: Custom-made shirts and pants, from a 14-inch neck and 29-inch sleeve for shirts and a 25-inch inseam for pants, all online; a short-rise option for pants online.

Someday I’m going to get my scrawny 5-foot-5 self to Singapore. Besides the standard vacation highlights – good food, fascinating history, deep relaxation – I want to score some custom-made suits for a fraction of what they would cost in the U.S. Esquire recently met up with Feroz Abdul of Eurobest Tailor in Singapore and toured his facilities. According to “The Incredible $600 Custom-Made Suit”, Eurobest is known for:

Quality

“We can copy the patterns of Armani, Christian Dior, whatever you’d like,” says Abdul, who has been plying his trade for three decades now. “We buy our fabrics direct from Italy,” says Abdul, “so we have the best silks, cashmeres, and Italian wools at a lower price.” This stock includes a range of lightweight super 100s to 200s. But even still, a suit made of their finest, most-expensive fabric, Vitale Barberis Canonico, will only cost about $1,200.

Speed

If there is a need for additional alterations, the shop can turn the suit around in less than a day. But since alterations are rare, the entire process is touted to take between three and eight hours. “We make a quality product with a fast turnaround so we can do a lot of business in one day,” says, Abdul.

Affordability

[One] reason why Abdul is so inexpensive is that he uses Toyota’s decentralized “just-in-time” assembly model. Shirts, jackets, and pants are made at separate locations outside of the storefront because each master tailor has one major concentration. This method increases productivity and also keeps the rent down. … Even if you factor in the price of a flight to Singapore, which will run you as much as $3,000, you can still get three suits for the same price you’d spend on a name-brand.

Speaking of expensive name-brand bespokery, GQ just posted a tidbit on an LA-based menswear boutique’s foray into that world. “For its first-ever line of bespoke suiting, California menswear shop South Willard enlisted an unlikely designer: Jasmin Shokrian, best known for her eponymous women’s label.” GQ deemed their first effort “so far, so good.” South Willard’s custom suits range from $3,000 to $4,000.

In perhaps the only Fashion Week coverage that matters, Simon Doonan hit the fall shows for Band of Outsiders, Rag & Bone, and Thom Browne, and proclaimed in his New York Observer column that “as a vertically challenged person, I couldn’t be happier”:

The truth of the matter is that fashion is having a midget moment. Our time has come. Since I am petite, and trendy men’s wear designers like Scotty [of BOO] are now cutting their clothes for shriveled heroin addicts with no internal organs, there is now more merch for me to buy than ever before. Tiny is the size du jour. An edgy shrunken jacket becomes, on my torso, a serviceably hip sport coat. Superskinny rocker pants? On my legs they become a nifty narrow trouser. When things were blousy and boxy—remember when Karl Lagerfeld was tubby and he always wore those Comme Des Garcons suits?—I was shit out of luck. Now, thanks to the new anorexia chic of the 21st century, I’m drowning in options. Choices! Choices! Choices! I am like a kid in a candy store.

Trademark wit aside, Doonan speaks with authority here (being both 5-foot-4.5 and the creative director at Barneys NY, credentials of equal weight, surely), expanding on a point I’ve mentioned previously on this site. Thanks to Thom Browne and the current shift toward downsized duds, times are good for the half-pint. So buy now. The glass may be half empty. As Doonan asks: “If tiny goes out of fashion, what the hell am I going to wear?”

See Jack Shop, a blog dedicated to “men’s style on a budget,” heralds “the resurgence of the skinny tie for Fall.” Huzzah, say I. Ties that are slightly trimmer than average are much better suited to a short man’s proportions. The key, as I’ve said before, is moderation: if you go too skinny, you run the risk of looking like a fashion victim a few years down the road (or, uh, possibly right now). Show a little restraint (I’ve found that approximately 3 inches wide works best for me) and you should be able to rock these so-called “skinny ties” well into the future.

See Jack cites a recent DNR article:

Italian neckwear is slimming down for fall. Even some classic tie makers are inching toward the reed-thin shapes introduced earlier by designers like Thom Browne and Hedi Slimane.

DNR goes on to split the centimeters for us:

Many neckwear producers have shaved a centimeter or two off the traditional tie width. For fall they favor relatively modern styles that are seven, eight or 8.5 centimeters wide. “What Dior brought to men’s wear six years ago is now touching our customer. We have seven-centimeter ties and even six-centimeter silk crochet ties that are selling well,” says Yvan Benbanaste, fashion coordinator for Pal Zileri.

See Jack Shop suggests a “Navy patterned Harkness tie from Urban Outfitters, $28.” I was traipsing around the city yesterday, measuring tape in hand (on my comparative tie-length measuring quest, the results of which I should be posting here soon), and I came across some smart-looking Skinny Ties on sale at Charles Tyrwhitt on Madison and 46th. They measure 8 cm wide and run about 28 inches long (about average). There was a whole bunch on sale for $29.95.

Curious about what goes on at a fitting for a custom shirt at Thomas Pink? Check out this recent Debonair Magazine post. I have yet to have any custom shirts made for me, so before I decide where I’m going to drop that kind of dough, it’s nice to see how different shirtmakers approach their craft. It’s also helpful to have a general idea of the process so you know what you’re getting into: what questions to ask, what choices you might have to make. The session, which took the Debonair Mag editors about an hour, consisted of these steps:

• Choose a fabric: Cost, as always, is based on materials used: the higher the fabric quality, the more expensive the final product.
• Discuss the shirt’s fit: Are you buying a shirt for work or leisure? Do you like a European cut or do you feel more comfortable in a relaxed fit?
• Get measured: This is the reason why people go custom instead of
  buying shirts off the rack – whether you’re short, have one arm longer than the other, have a necksize that, god forbid, lies somewhere in between the standard half-inch gradients…
• Choose collar and cuff styles: Here’s where you can express a personal style or blend in with the crowd.

Eight weeks later (and a few hundred bucks lighter) and you’ve got a custom-made shirt that should fit better than anything you could ever find on the shelf. FYI: Only a few Thomas Pink stores offer the Personally Pink service, including NYC’s Madison Ave. and Wall St. branches.