Sewing for men : The peacoat edition

Over the course of my 13+ years of marriage I've sewn only a handful of things for my husband. Some he wears some he doesn't which is why I stopped. The last thing I made for him was a technically perfect woven shirt. Except the buttons went on the girl way which was not acceptable to him so he never wore it.

There's very little wiggle room in menswear. The range of acceptable fit, fabrication and finishes is very small, minute even. So one little thing off and its game over. With sewing for women you can get away with creative fudges and flubs and overall the quality of RTW for women has gotten so poor you could hand sew a rag together and people would think you bought it at Forever 21. But menswear has remained pretty consistent in the styling and quality that its harder to successfully emulate.

So I haven't sewn anything for him in about 10 years I was waiting for him to ask and with my latest spree of tailored jackets he decided he would like one too. This I feel good about. One because I feel jackets are my speciality and two its more likely to get worn. Why? Because he doesn't have any alternatives. You see we live in L.A. and it seldoms gets cold so we don't really own coats but on the rare day that we wake up and its OMG 60 degrees out there we rummage though our closet and wear what we can find. So there is a good chance between a cold snap and a trip to Vegas (where I was cosy in my Anise) that this WILL get worn.

For the pattern I am using a japanese pattern book called "Men's Coat Making" (I think its in Japanese so who knows?) which I picked up in Little Tokyo but you can grab a copy here. It was about $35 and has 13 patterns to trace off but they all variations of 4 basic styles. Trenchcoat, Peacoat, Duffle coat and a classic Overcoat. I'm making a variation between styles 6 and 7 which is a peacoat.

The fabric I purchased from Mood online which was a much better experience than in store though they are slow to ship I feel but since I sat on the fabric for 4 months I don't think it matters though in theory if it had arrived earlier I would have started straight away.

I had done the test fit about 3 months ago but I just cut the front and backs out and started sewing. I interfaced the whole front and half of the back using some interfacing I got from Michael Levines which is a lightweight non-woven fusible in black but it also has lines of white chain stitching running parallel to the grain approx. 3/32" apart. I cut it so the lines of reinforcement ran horizontally. I also reinforced the lapel area with the lines being parallel to the roll line. I will do something similar when I cut the collar. I might also cut a shoulder shield on the bias. This is a really nice interfacing it's perfect for doing a fusible style of tailoring since it mimics the qualities of the hair canvas but its only $1.50 for 60" wide.

So far I have only cut out the fronts and back and sewn the shoulders and side seams. The thread I got is not a close enough match for doing the top stitching on the front pockets so the project is already on hiatus but thats ok because it's the first day of summe and its 80 degrees outside.