Most men think it's their body. Tailors have known otherwise for decades.

You probably noticed it in small things first. The button that sits fine until you sit down. Turning side-on to the mirror before you commit to anything. A photo someone took from an angle you didn't choose. The three seconds every morning where you rule out half the wardrobe before you've touched a hanger.

And here's the bit that gets missed. The size is right. You measured. You went up one anyway. It still doesn't sit.

That's because size and shape are two different problems. Shops only sell you a fix for one of them.

It isn't your weight. It isn't discipline. It isn't you.

They won't talk about bodies. They'll talk about patterns.

Tailors spend their working lives fixing clothes that don't fit. They'll tell you the same thing every time.

Every top on the rail is cut from one basic shape. The factory scales that shape up and down for each size — chest and waist growing together, by amounts someone decided once, without ever meeting you. If your build doesn't match those amounts, the top fails. Trying the next size up doesn't help, because the next size up is the same shape.

A tailor would take that top in at the waist and let it out through the chest. Then charge you again for the next one. And the one after that.

Or you do it the other way round. Once. Underneath. For everything you already own.

7 signs it's the clothes, not you

• Your correct size pulls across the chest but hangs loose at the waist
• Going up a size fixes one problem and makes you look bigger everywhere
• You own tops you liked enough to buy and have never worn out
• You reach for the looser one every time, without really deciding to
• You keep a jumper or a jacket on indoors more than you'd admit
• In a changing room you check your side profile, not your front
• Everything looks fine standing up and pulls the second you sit down

If two or three of those landed, this isn't a willpower problem, and a different size won't fix it.

Sizing up. Going looser. Neither one works.

Sizing up gives your chest room. It also gives your waist, shoulders and arms room they never needed. You swap one bad fit for a different bad fit, and end up looking bigger than you are.

Going looser does work, in the sense that baggy hides a lot. It just costs you everything fitted you own — which is exactly why the tops you actually like are the ones that never get worn.

A tailor is the real fix, because a tailor solves shape instead of size. It just costs you a fee per garment, on every garment, forever. Most men never go once.

Rightcut

A seamless vest that goes on under your clothes. It flattens your stomach and waist and smooths your chest, so what you put over it hangs the way it was meant to.

It goes on first, before everything else. No side seams, so there's no line to show through a fitted top. You don't change your wardrobe and you don't change your body. Your clothes just get the shape they were cut for.