Single or double-breasted: how to decide from your shoulders
The front of a jacket is a frame for your face. Which one suits you has less to do with fashion than with the width of your shoulders and the way you stand.
Every week somebody sits down at the bench and asks for a double-breasted jacket because they have seen one, and every week I ask them to stand up first. It is a decision you can make from two things you already know about yourself: how wide your shoulders are, and how you carry them.
What the two fronts actually do
A single-breasted jacket closes with one row of buttons and opens into a long V. The eye runs down that V and the body reads as taller. A double-breasted jacket laps one front over the other and closes with two rows, so the chest carries a broad rectangle of cloth and the body reads as wider and squarer.
- FrontSingle or double
- ButtonsTwo or three
- ShoulderStandard or soft
- VentOne at the back, two at the sides, or none
- FitSlim or classic
None of that is a rule. It is a set of levers, and the two questions below are how I decide which way to pull them.
Start with the shoulders
Measure across your back, shoulder point to shoulder point. If that number is large for your height, a double-breasted front adds width you do not need and the jacket reads as a wall. Single-breasted, two buttons, with a soft shoulder gives the same chest somewhere to go.
If the number is narrow, the opposite holds. The overlapping front builds a chest the cloth would not otherwise have, and the wider lapel that comes with it finishes the frame. It is the one cut that flatters a slight build more than a broad one, which is the reverse of what most people assume.
Then the way you stand
A double-breasted jacket only works closed. Undone, the overlapping front hangs off centre and the line comes apart. If you spend the day sitting down, in meetings, in cars, at tables, you will be unbuttoning it every twenty minutes and it will spend most of its life looking wrong. A single-breasted jacket survives that.
Posture counts too. Shoulders that roll forward pull a double-breasted lap open at the hem. We can cut for it. It is easier to choose around it.
What we cut most
Two buttons, single-breasted, classic fit, side vents. It is the most forgiving jacket in the book and it is what most first suits should be. The double-breasted comes second, and almost always for somebody buying their third.
If you are still undecided, the gallery is the quickest way through it. Every photograph there is a real garment that left this bench, and you will know within a minute which front you keep looking at.
