This particular jacket from Whitcomb & Shaftesbury is machine washable. This is very rare – why?
First, most good tailored jackets are made with canvas in the chest and melton below the collar, both of which do not react well to machine washing (even at cold temperatures). They become deformed and may shrink.
Second, jacket materials generally cannot be machine washed. Cotton is the easiest in this respect, but the material still has to be thoroughly washed beforehand – often several times – to remove all shrinkage.
Bespoke tailoring is also harder than regular suits, as there is often more intricate canvassing inside, sometimes more delicate handwork, and the overall shape is more accurately created in a 3D shape that can be distorted by washing. That’s why expert pressure after dry cleaning is so important.
So when Whitcomb showed me a really nice looking machine washable jacket they were working on for a client, I was interested.
However, not because of convenience. I cared less about whether I could clean it at home, and more about whether it would bring a particular cotton jacket closer to a ready-to-wear jacket.
Custom customers are often disappointed when purchasing cotton jackets. They’ve seen a product from an Italian brand like Boglioli or an English brand like Drake in a store, and they want that softness, that casualness, but to fit.
Custom cotton jackets usually do not look like this because of the stiffness created by their internal structure, but also because they cannot be washed – and almost all ready-to-wear cotton jackets are industrially washed.
This washing of clothes takes place in large vats, in large wash houses, and provides attractive colors to the jackets around the edges and seams. The material is also often industrially pre-washed to break down and soften the cotton.
This can happen with dry cleaning, but only in the long run. Generally the purpose of dry cleaning is not to affect the material, as this is what the customer wants. King Charles has some cotton jackets that have faded beautifully, but when I spoke to the tailors who made them for him, they told me they were all at least 10 years old.
Even if it’s just a year or two, most people don’t have the patience to clean clothes this frequently – they don’t like keeping it in that condition for so long and hence don’t enjoy wearing it that much. Even today raw denim suffers from this problem we recently discussedAnd there’s no benefit to tailoring in becoming more personal than the way it fades.
My hope with the Whitcomb & Shaftesbury jacket was that it would start to break in and fade quickly when I washed it at home, making it closer to the sleek, lived-in look of the RTW cotton jacket.
As shown here, the jacket has been machine washed three times. Regular detergent, regular cycle, spin only 30 degrees and less. It is then hung on a good hanger and left to dry.
The jacket was made without canvas in the chest or a melton under the collar, but was given some control and shape at the front by hand-stitching at the collar. It is noteworthy that when the jacket is worn it retains the shape it usually does, despite all types of basting.
The jacket not only fits me better in 2D terms than the RTW – perfect length, width, overall shape – but in specific terms, with the chest shape, the pitch of the sleeves, the grip at the neck.
After the second wash I tried steaming it to remove some of the wrinkles. We have a nice steamer in our office and I spent a good 10 minutes working on each part of the jacket.
This smoothed the body and sleeves, but had less effect on the patch pockets, which did not change much. Replacing them will require some careful ironing.
In any case, most of the wrinkles returned after half an hour of wear, especially in areas like the elbows and lower back. And apparently felt better for it.
The Whitcomb team also pressed it when I first bought it, making everything look perfectly smooth, but after I wore it for a while it started to look better again. That’s the aesthetics of the thing, the point. (I will write a follow-up article on style points like this.)
After those three washes, the jacket’s seams and edges have started to fade a bit, but it’s barely noticeable. Since the color is so good from a style standpoint, the fade will be more noticeable on a darker color like navy or black. Maybe that’s a good idea for next time.
The stitching stitches around the pockets also needed to be strengthened to cope with the combination of machine washing and heavy use I put the pockets through. But they’ve been perfect ever since, and it’s a note to Whitcomb for the future – after all, he hasn’t made many of these jackets yet.
There’s a lot to say on this project, and so I’ve deliberately divided the coverage into two sections: one on the practicality of the washable bespoke jacket, and the other on aesthetic choices like material, color and design, as well as why I find this style so attractive and how I’m wearing it.
That second part will be published Wednesday This week. Please hold questions about those things until that’s okay.
This jacket, priced at £2400 including VAT, is custom-made from Whitcombe and Shaftesbury. Other colors available in the same material include black, navy, olive and beige.
The clothes featured in the main costume, shown above and below:
