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Would you trust an algorithm to make you a suit? Swedish entrepreneurs Alexander Moström and Daniel Apler, founders of tailoring brand Blugiallo, are hoping you will. When they founded the company in 2016, Moström and Apler believed there was scope to reframe sleek, made-to-measure tailoring for the taste and budget of a younger, more digital-savvy client. Men just out of university who were “already 10 suits behind” their older, better-resourced co-workers, says Apler.
“There’s always been a bunch of made-to-measure brands out there,” says Moström of the cheaper alternative to bespoke. “But [even that can be] a hassle, and not fit for the modern consumer’s lifestyle.”
At first, Blugiallo (the name is a portmanteau of blu and giallo – blue and yellow in Italian) wanted to bolster its in-person business with a digital offering that allowed clients to design and order suits online. But it was hard to guarantee sizing accuracy: “you’d be surprised how poorly people can measure themselves,” says Apler.
In 2020, using clients’ measurements, the brand created a dataset of 1,000-plus unique sizes that could be turned into an algorithm to calculate a perfect fit for each customer. By collaborating with the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås, Sweden, they eventually amassed a cache of more than 12,000 unique physiques to teach the program further still. “Suddenly, the [size accuracy] was surprisingly high,” says Moström. Thanks to more clients and further data, Moström claims it now offers near-perfect sizing accuracy.
While a bespoke suit is designed from scratch to your exact specifications (in line with the house style of the tailor), a made-to-measure suit is adapted to your requirements from an existing block, making it much cheaper. Though considerably more costly than conventional ready-to-wear, Blugiallo’s made-to-measure service ranges from £650 for a neat grey twill two-piece suit to more than £1,000, depending on cloth choice, jacket construction and extras. By contrast, the made-to-measure service at Gieves & Hawkes starts from £1,695. At Richard James it’s £1,700 and at Hackett it’s £1,900. Blugiallo suits are mainly made in India, though the brand uses suppliers in Italy, Japan and the UK as well. Delivery takes between five and six weeks.
Other UK-market brands, such as Moss and Suit Supply, offer a sub-£1,000 price point for made-to-measure, but the house style is decidedly slim and corporate. The only suitmaker that looks to operate in the same algorithm-driven way as Blugiallo is Proper Cloth, a US brand that also offers similar variations in lining, canvas construction and gauge of trousers. (One option is an “athletic” fit, which one assumes means muscular.) A pleasantly roomy double-breasted suit in unlined, full-canvas navy Baird McNutt linen comes in at $945. It even has functional cuff buttons.
What sets Blugiallo apart, however, is that it has roundly embraced the looser swooping shapes that define the coolest tailoring, such as Australian brand P Johnson, vintage Giorgio Armani and fellow Swedish brand Saman Amel. Trousers are high-waisted and available with pleats; blazers are soft-shouldered with minimal construction in the chest (though full-canvas is available) and equipped with broad lapels. A double-breasted two-piece suit in “pastis” white Super 130s wool herringbone starts at £825. Moström says that “we use the same fabrics, the same construction and, many times, the same suppliers” as those other brands too. The pricing is competitive – although, concedes Moström, “we’re maybe priced a little bit too low”.
A nimble, made-to-measure service is the future for smaller brands, says Adam Cameron, co-founder of The Workers Club where custom tailoring starts at £895. TWC, which usually trades in outerwear and made-in-Japan denim, started offering casual custom tailoring to clients in 2020, and recently rolled the service out further still. “For us, it just made sense to find the sweet spot between mass production and making one-off things,” he says. And the service allows you to choose the cloth, the lining, the buttons, the trouser hem, the pocket style and the shape of the lapels. It may not have the same pomp and ceremony as a visit to Savile Row, but that can be “quite an exclusive experience”, says Cameron. “I’d like to think this is more approachable.”
Blugiallo has a shop in Stockholm, but around half of its business is online. “Those clients tend to be more satisfied than the guys who go the showroom,” says Moström. “It comes down to expectations. You’ve lowered them quite a bit when you [buy a suit] online.” Returns are very rare (though he does point out that Swedish right of return doesn’t apply to Blugiallo’s custom-made goods). They do shift a lot of made-to-measure business shirts and navy blue suits, but clients tend to come back for more original commissions.
Cameron concurs, saying that clients tend to mimic whatever’s on the mannequin. “I don’t want to suggest men are unimaginative,” he says, “but they are a bit more like, ‘If I can see it, I know I like it.’” Perhaps someone’s working on an algorithm for that too.
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