Weddingbee Blog

We didn’t spend much time looking in stores around here for Cinnamon Buns’ suit. Being from a province where everyone brags about our beef and where it seems like 80% of restaurants call themselves steak houses, well, let’s just say that there are a lot of ‘Big & Tall’ suit shops around. Cinnamon Buns is not big, and both of us would be laughed out of any shop that has ‘tall’ in the name. So we were looking for a nice black suit (with vest!) that would come in the right size, with a price we could afford.

Enter Indochino. Indochino is a website that sells custom-made suits! You put in your measurements, pick your suit, click through the customizing steps and BOOM. Suit tailored to you delivered to your door in a few weeks. Three weeks, in our case! We ordered their “tailor’s kit” first, to get a feel for the suit fabrics. With the cheap suit prices, I was expecting cheap, unacceptable, shiny fabric, but they were really nice good quality wool. We picked this one, the Black Day At The Office suit:

Photo (and suit) from Indochino

In the customizing steps, you get to choose how many buttons (vest & jacket), back flap or vent on the jacket, lining colours and the like. We decided that it would be fun to have a coloured lining for the jacket – Cinnamon Buns picked purple. We figured we’d get the vest to match, so it got a purple lining too. I measured him, using the useful drawings and videos on the website when we weren’t sure what to do, it was all very quick and easy. Three weeks later, this arrived:

You can see the purple!

Cinnamon Buns, looking very serious wearing wedding shirt and non-wedding tie with his new suit. I’m sure this will come as a surprise to no one, but it is hard to photograph a black suit in a dim apartment!

The fit was really good considering that it was made from measurements I took, and made by some person somewhere who has never met Cinnamon Buns. The pants need to be made a little longer (neither of us has that particular problem very often!) but there is plenty of hem to let down. The vest fits fine. The jacket was fine when standing like he is in the photos, but pulled across the back when he went to hug me. Now I want him to be able to hug me on our wedding day without worrying about ripping his suit, so we took the jacket to a tailor. Indochino currently has a $75 perfect fit guarantee – if you take your garment to tailor to get just the right fit, and fill in the proper form on the website within the right amount of time, you can get up to $75 from Indochino to pay for alterations. The tailor we went to said that en-biggening the back/shoulder area of the jacket would cost $60-$75. Bingo. Oh, and thinking of the money, I bought a Groupon a few months before that got us $100 off the already-reasonable suit!

Mmmm, love a man in a vest.

Here is where we get to the only real surprise of the order. The picture of the back of the vest on the model shows it as black. The lining on the suit is also shown as black. The thing is, when it arrived, we discovered that the back of the vest is not actually the wool suit fabric, it is the lining fabric. You can see where this is going, yes?

Oops. We’d both pictured it being black on the back, with purple on the inside. I mean, it isn’t horrible, and would look quite sharp with a black shirt, but neither of us is sure what to do for the wedding. Is purple vest-back ok? Does it look funny? It wasn’t mentioned at all on the website that the back of the vest would be the lining. Maybe this is more obvious to people who buy suits more often?

With a white shirt, I think it might be ok, even though purple isn’t a wedding colour. But I’m just not sure about purple and teal. We’d both been picturing completely black vests setting off the teal shirt so nicely. We probably won’t send this one back, because it does match the suit nicely, and is a nice vest, but we may order another vest that would be completely black.

What would you do? Stick with the purple? Go back and get an all-black one?