Make It Fit: How tailoring is the secret to your perfect wardrobe

Tailoring is generally thought of as something you’ll ask your grandma to do for your prom dress, or a favour from your mum when your jeans are too long. Despite these connotations, and the idea of tailoring as a tricky, exacting skill; I really believe tailoring has an important place in everyday life.

Driven by family, I have always found joy in textiles and sewing, such as hand-sewing Christmas tree decorations for fun. It wasn’t until sixth form that I realised how diverse fashion and textiles truly were - I learnt pattern making and real sewing techniques that transformed my unruly festive décor into a practical skill. Even though I now focus on less creative subjects, I’ve retained this love for the practical skills that I developed when I was younger.

These days clothing companies are the ones who control and define sizing, which is not only damaging, but also limiting. By tailoring your own clothes, you can modify premade clothes to work for you. Even though I admittedly am not as sustainable as I would like to be, tailoring for me is one of the ways I can ensure the fit of my clothes remains good for longer. Buying fast fashion is not the ideal, but for many people sustainable fashion brands are currently too expensive. So, tailoring your own clothes can increase the longevity of them, therefore contributing less to the fast fashion industry in the long-term.

If you have an interest in tailoring at home, it helps to have a sewing machine as this just speeds up the process. However, I do understand that these are expensive and most simple tailoring can be done by hand stitching. I find that chalk, light colour pencils, safety pins and even eyeshadow to be good temporary markers for resizing marks (basically anything you can wipe off after you’ve finished). With these, marking the length or amount of fabric you want to remove is always good. I would also recommend if you are new (or even not to be honest!), that you avoid the scissors if possible. Not only can you not replace fabric that’s been removed, but you may want to readjust at a different time and what was once excess material may come in handy!

My advice would just be to give it a go as most mistakes are fixable and you never know, you could fall back in love with some of your favourite pieces again!