Using Tailoring To Make Fast Fashion Look Expensive

Most spend waste away in front of closets, wondering why none of their clothes actually look good. You might have a huge pile of outfits on your bed, and you might have even spent a decent amount of money on them. And still it looks like it just came off a plastic mannequin at the mall. Here is the secret that fashion experts don't always tell you: looking expensive has nothing to do with the price tag. It has everything to do with how the clothes fit your specific body. All you need is a tailor, or sometimes just a needle and thread. It’s time to take that pile of fast fashion and learn how to make a $29 jacket look like a designer masterpiece.

You can have a blazer made from fabric that costs more than your rent, but if the shoulder seam is dangling halfway down your arm, it reads as borrowed from dad’s closet. instead of “  of a power outfit. The thing about fast fashion blazers is that they will never fit perfectly. The shoulders are always a little too wide. A tailor fixes this in roughly the time it takes to watch one episode of whatever show you are pretending you haven’t already finished. They shorten the sleeves so your watch peeks out. Tailoring can take in the back so the jacket actually hugs your shoulders instead of swallowing them. Suddenly, that $40 blazer looks like it was made for you. 

Pants can come off the rack, pretending they fit everyone, but they actually fit almost no one. Usually there's a bunch of problems. Either the waist gaps, the hem drags, or the crotch does weird things when you sit down. Its not your body that is the problem. It's the fact that mass-produced pants are made for an imaginary average that does not exist in real life. So you have two choices.

You can keep tugging and twisting and feeling annoyed every time you wear them, or you can spend eight dollars getting the waist taken in and twelve dollars getting them hemmed and suddenly feel like you discovered a life hack you should have known about years ago. Hemming is the biggest bang for your buck in the entire fashion universe. A pair of trousers that hits right at the top of your shoe instead of bunching up like an accordion instantly looks more expensive. 

Shirt sleeves are the neglected middle child of clothing alterations. Everyone focuses on the waist, forgetting that arms are doing a lot of work when it comes to creating an overall impression. When a long-sleeve shirt bunches up around your elbows because the arms are too long, it distracts from everything else you have going on. A tailor can shorten a sleeve in minutes. They can also taper a sleeve that feels like it is housing a small tent in the forearm area. Tailoring makes your shirt, a custom and expensive, even the one you grabbed off the clearance rack.

People assume that making clothes fit at the waist means making them tight, which is not the case. Fit means the garment follows the shape of your body without fighting or squeezing it. Fast fashion loves to sell dresses and tops that are basically rectangles with armholes. They are cheap to produce because they do not require shaping. But a rectangle hanging off a human looks like you borrowed a smock from a craft fair. A tailor can add those little sewn folds called darts that create shape for almost anything. A dress that was swimming on you suddenly has a waistline. This costs very little money and changes everything, making you look fancy in your outfit.  

Button-down shirts are the great equalizer. Everyone owns at least three. Most people own more than they want to admit. And almost everyone faces the same problem: the gap. You know the one. That little pull across the chest where the fabric is doing its best, but physics is physics. Or the collar that refuses to lie flat because the shirt is cut for a neck that is not yours. Or the sleeves that make you feel like you are wearing a parachute. A tailor solves all of this by moving the buttons so the gap disappears. They can take in the sides so the shirt actually skims your body instead of billowing out like a sail. They can even slim down the arms so you do not feel like you are losing a fight with your own sleeve every time you reach for a coffee cup. The result is a shirt that looks expensive because it fits the way expensive shirts fit: effortlessly. 

Everyone has one. The dress you bought because it was gorgeous, but it has been hanging in your closet for two years with the tags still on, because something about it just feels wrong. The jacket you grabbed on sale has perfect color, but sleeves that make you look like you are preparing for a flood. These are not lost causes; they are waiting for you to find a tailor and give them some shine. The fact that you bought them means they already have style. They just need the finishing touches that make them wearable. Spending twenty dollars to turn that outfit into something you reach for every week is not a waste of money, but an investment. You need to get the value out of what you already bought.