Superior Suiting: The Indochino Experience, Part 1

A showroom can say a lot about a menswear business. While some of New York's purveyors of quality suits exude uptown nonchalance (hi there, SuitSupply), custom clothier Indochino cultivates a sense of downtown class that is perfectly suited to its purposes. That's where the showroom comes in. Located on Broome Street, Indochino's Manhattan quarters fit nicely into the nearby café-brasserie-storefront scene. Trim, efficient, modern in its methods, inflected with just the right amount of old-world charm -- this is the ambience you can expect on your first trip, and that ambience will inflect the suit you create. And for the better. Huge, hanging fabric samples -- an array and a format that could be imported from the 19th century -- greet all showroom visitors. The message, as I see it, is to create a suit that will stand the test of time, a suit that avoids whimsies and proves itself worthy of these fabrics, without proving unworthy of a company as technologically efficient and Internet-fluent as Indochino.

Whether you intend to go on-site, or work mostly with the well-curated online offerings, you will find that Indochino should be your destination for classic and soon-to-be-classic styles. Even if you stay within the Standard Collection, you will have your choice of subtle patterns in herringbone, shadow plaid, and more. Branch out a bit, and you can design a suit in lush green or whitened tan. (Indochino also offers some enviable pieces of eveningwear: I'm eyeing the company's midnight blue tuxedo for my next opera opening, Metropolitan Museum benefit gala, or excuse to wander around looking like a billionaire.) This is where you can start your suit collection, or where you can come for reliable, essential new entries. I found myself in exactly the latter position last weekend, when I visited Indochino for a custom fitting: after years of wearing a suit four or five days a week, I had accumulated gray striped suit after gray striped suit, but had nothing in the way of navy pinstripe.

Then I was directed to a ream of Indichino's supple, all-weather navy pinstripe wool. Problem solved.

The on-premises measuring and customization process, for its part, is remarkably swift, equal parts old-school measuring tape and iPhone-recorded data. At Indochino, the sales representatives excel at responding to menswear minutiae ("What if I can't cup my fingers under the bottom edge of my jacket?") without attempting to impose a menswear vision that may or may not be helpful (usually not) on your choices. Remember where you are: if your own vision of menswear is best described as "21st-century Oscar Wilde," you're out of luck. The customization options at Indochino are designed for more subtle shows of personality -- pick stiching or not? a vest with or without lapels? a (subtly) contrasting buttonhole or two? Few or none of the choices you make could yield you a strange suit, but every choice still counts.

You'll be hearing more once I am onto the second stage of Indochino's customization process: the tailoring fine points of the suit I have had customized and fit to measure. As is normal in the world of custom and bespoke garments, manufacture time is roughly a month. In the meantime, check back for the next profile in our Superior Suiting series. An impeccable navy pinstripe three-piece doesn't happen overnight.