“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”

- Michaelangelo

For me at least, nothing quite captures the artisanal extremity of bespoke tailoring more than the process of “ripping and smoothing” a basted try-on. There’s something almost extravagantly spectacular about disassembling (“ripping!”) something which has been been the object of hours of labor (not to mention the subject of a half-dozen episodes in this series), but for my tailor Rory Duffy, the process was so mundane that he was halfway through it before I even arrived with my camera.

In the previous episode of “The Making of a Coat,” tailor Rory Duffy removed the patch pockets basted onto my try-on in order to take in the chest darts. Reapplying them now provides him with an opportunity to address a problem he’d noticed in the fitting: because he’d orginally basted the pockets on the flat surface of his bench, they weren’t allowing for the curvature of my hips, causing the foreparts to slightly bunch. This is resolved by simply rebasting the pockets broken over a sleeve board. We’ve seen before how Duffy uses sleeve and chest boards to press and repress the elements of the coat “half and half” between stages of construction to impart shape and check the relation between its layers: this is why. No shame in a mistake caught and fixed.

As part of the post-fitting alterations to my coat, tailor Rory Duffy cut back the front edges -- along with the left and right back, the left and right back foreparts, and the left and right chest darts -- to help evenly distribute reduction throughout the body; these must now be shaped. In a break with his former master at Henry Poole & Co, Paul Frearson, Duffy here eschews “rock of eye” freehand drafting for the consistency of a metal curve; he is, after all, trying to establish his own style in a crowded market. Next, the front edges of both foreparts are carefully laid atop each other to guarantee a perfectly symmetrical cut. The canvas is then trimmed back to leave only a minimal ¼” seam allowance, which will make for a fine, supple front edge.

Having drawn off the front edges with bias lining tape in the previous episode of “The Making of a Coat,” tailor Rory Duffy now sets about distributing their rippling fullness by hand. With each padstitch, he is mindful to impart the shape he wants (convex on the lapels, concave from the buttoning point down) and to avoid picking up the cloth as he attaches the bias lining to the body canvas. The latter task is somewhat more demanding than it once was, as ever-lighter and less forgiving cloth, canvas, and interlinings require tailors to work with “softer hands.”