Going to Hoi An for the Custom Clothes

Hoi An is a small trading town on the central Vietnamese coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the tailoring capital of Southeast Asia. Hundreds of shops in a town you can walk across in twenty minutes, all of them able to make you a suit, a coat or a dress from scratch in a day or two.

Budget travellers who would never otherwise buy clothes make an exception here, and they are right to.

What it costs and how long it takes

You will hear "suit in 24 hours" and it is true, and it is also the wrong way to do it. A rushed garment gets one fitting. A good one gets two or three.

Give it three days minimum. Order on the first afternoon, first fitting the next day, adjustments, collect on day three. That is the difference between something you wear for years and something you wear until you get home and look at it properly.

Prices vary enormously with the cloth, which is where the real cost sits. Expect to pay several times more for good wool than for the cheapest synthetic blends, and expect the shop to steer you toward the fabric it has most of.

Choosing a shop, which is the whole thing

There are far more tailors than there is tailoring talent. Many of the shops on the main streets are sales fronts that send the work out to the same few workrooms.

What actually helps:

• Look at finished garments hanging in the shop, inside out. Check the seams, the lining and the buttonholes rather than the display fabric.
• Ask to see the workroom. The good places will show you.
• Read recent reviews, not old ones. Shops here change hands and reuse names.
• Bring a garment you already own and love, and ask them to copy the fit. This works better than any amount of describing.
• Bring pictures of what you want. Do not rely on a shared vocabulary for lapels.

Be specific and be present. The commonest complaint about Hoi An tailoring is not bad workmanship, it is a customer who said "something like that" and got something like that.

The fitting

Go to every fitting and say what is wrong. Politeness is the enemy here. If the shoulders are tight or the trousers break badly, say so, because they will fix it and they expect to.

Try things sitting down as well as standing. A jacket that works while you are on your feet in the shop can be unwearable in an aeroplane seat.

Getting it home

Most shops will ship, and it is worth doing rather than carrying suits around Vietnam for another three weeks. Get a tracking number and keep the receipt. Ask about customs duty at your end before you agree, because on several suits it is not nothing.

And do not spend the whole trip shopping

Hoi An is a genuinely beautiful town, which is easy to forget in the middle of a fitting schedule. The old quarter is lantern-lit and closed to traffic in the evenings, An Bang beach is a fifteen minute bicycle ride away, and the Hai Van Pass railway north to Hue is one of the best rides in the country.

One practical note: central Vietnam's wet season runs roughly September to December and Hoi An floods most years. Shops carry on regardless, but the streets can be knee deep.

Photo credit