This bespoke jacket from Whitcomb & Shaftesbury is machine washable. That is rare – why?
First, many fine embroidered jackets are made with fabric on the chest and melton under the collar, both of which do not respond well to machine washing (even at a cool temperature). They are distorted and can wrinkle.
Second, the coat material itself cannot be machine washed. Cotton is the easiest of those, but even so the material must be thoroughly washed beforehand – usually several times – so all wrinkles are removed.
Bespoke tailoring is also more difficult than a normal suit, because there is often a complex campaign inside, sometimes delicate handwork, and the whole shape is made very precisely with a 3D shape that cannot be distorted by washing. This is why professional pressure after dry cleaning is so important.
So when Whitcomb showed me a great looking machine washable jacket they were working on for a client, I was interested.
However, not for the sake of simplicity. I didn’t mind the fact that I could clean it at home, and besides it would bring the decorated cotton jacket next to the ready-to-wear ones.
Bespoke buyers are often disappointed when ordering a cotton jacket. They’ve seen one in an Italian brand store like Boglioli or an English brand like Drake’s, and they want that softness, that ease, but made to fit.
Regular cotton jackets rarely look that way because of the sharpness caused by their internal structure, but also because they cannot be washed – and almost all ready-to-wear cotton jackets are not industrially washed.
This laundry takes place in large containers, in large laundry rooms, and gives the jacket an attractive fade at the edges and seams. The material itself is also often pre-washed industrially, to break down the cotton and soften it.
This can be done with dry cleaning, but only for a long time. Usually the purpose of dry cleaning is not to damage the property, as customers want the same. King Charles has some pretty faded cotton jackets, but when I spoke to the tailors who made them for him, they noted that they are at least 10 years old.
Even if that was a year or two, most people don’t have the patience to wash clothes like this over and over again – having them for a long time in a condition they don’t like and therefore don’t enjoy wearing a lot. Even raw denim suffers from this problem today, likewe talked recentlyand sewing does not have the advantage of being too personal in the way it fades.
My hope for the Whitcomb & Shaftesbury jacket was that it would quickly begin to fray and fade when I washed it at home, giving it something closer to that attractive, lived-in look of RTW’s cotton jackets.
As shown here, the jacket has been machine washed three times. Normal wash, normal cycle, just 30 degrees and low spin. It is then hung on a nice hanger and left to dry.
The coat was made without canvas on the chest or melton under the collar, but some control and shape was given to the front by hand-stitching on the collar. Surprisingly, the jacket retains much of that shape when worn, despite all the bespoke underpinnings it usually has.
The coat doesn’t just fit better than RTW can in 2D terms – correct length, width, overall shape – but in bespoke terms, with the shape of the chest, the pitch of the sleeve, the hold in the neck.
After the second wash I tried steaming it, to get some wrinkles out. We have a nice steamer in the office and I spent 10 minutes working every part of the coat.
This smoothed out the body and sleeves, but had a slight effect on the patch pockets, which don’t change much. Some careful ironing may be required to replace those.
In any case, after half an hour of wearing most of the wrinkles were back, especially in places like the elbows and lower back. And frankly he seemed better for it.
The Whitcomb team repressed it the first time I got it, which made everything smoother, but it also looked better after wearing it for a while. This is the beauty of the thing, the point. (I’ll do a follow-up article with style points like this one.)
After those three washes, the coat has started to fade a little at the seams and edges, but it’s not noticeable anymore. As good as the color is from a style point of view, the fade will be more noticeable in a dark color like navy or black. Maybe that’s a good idea next time.
The tack seams around the pockets also needed strengthening, to cope with the combination of machine washing and heavy use I put on the pockets. But they’ve been perfect ever since, and that’s Whitcomb’s note for the future – they haven’t made many of these jackets, after all.
There’s a lot more to say about this project, so I’ve deliberately split the coverage into two sections: this one is about the functionality of the washable bespoke jacket, and the second is about aesthetic choices like material, color and design, as well as why the style appeals to me so much and how I’ve been wearing it.
That second episode will be published in itWednesdaythis week. Please hold questions about those things until then, if that’s okay.
This jacket costs £2400 including VAT from Whitcomb and Shaftesbury, which is bespoke. Other colors available in the same case include black, navy, olive and beige.
The outfits pictured in the main outfit, shown above and below: