Riffing on “make it your own” a bit here. Yes, bespoke is much too costly for many of us, but that shouldn’t stop us from making clothing our own. I call it clothes hacking, but adding a new element to a clothing item, whether it be new buttons (rustic gunmetal blue blazer buttons!) or stitching or some other sort of flare (gauntlet button thread color?), there are ways to make it your own.

Mister Wong offers some sage style advise in his post on experimenting with bespoke shirt options.

bespoke is a journey & not an over night success.

I need a tailor like Vahram Mateosian of Mr. Ned’s. And here’s why. Add a bespoke suit from Mr. Ned’s to the bucket list.

best known for outfitting the director Wes Anderson

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The saxophone player Jason Marshall, 26, a rising star who cites Miles Davis as a style influence, began getting his suits from Mr. Ned about a year ago, partly because of admiring P. Diddy’s former valet, Fonzworth Bentley.

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Vahram now believes that Mr. Anderson’s 2001 movie, The Royal Tenenbaums, manifested a new frontier in men’s fashion. He says that when the director told him what he wanted, he spoke frankly, as Vahram always does. “I told him I didn’t think it was going to work,” he said. “But when he put it on—he proved me wrong. I love it when that happens.”

I’ve been a big proponent of (affordable) bespoke items for a while now. Most of all it’s fun for me to add my own flavor and details to pieces. The New York Times runs down the bespoke trend and identifies that there are far more items you can get custom-made than just a suit or shirt. My favorite bit of the article is some of the reasoning for why guys chose the bespoke route.

Part of the appeal of custom culture is that it taps into the connoisseurship and one-upmanship that has long been central to guy culture. But whereas this was once the province of a certain tax bracket and its implicit fixations — Savile Row suits, golf clubs, cigars and single-malt Scotch — it now includes youthful fetishes with the coolest surfboards, sneakers and skateboards.

What sort of people buy bespoke suits: “the extremely wealthy, the status-crazed, and those so minutely particular in their needs that no preexisting suit will do“. I’m not wealthy, nor status crazed; however, I am very minutely particular in my needs.