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Shirt Style Tips For Thin Men - Skinny Dress Shirt Advice - Focus On Collar Fit - Sleeve
Length
Hi! I'm Antonio Centeno, the founder of Real Men Real Style. Today, I'm going to be giving
a style advice to an extremely skinny, young man.
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Okay. This is the question that came in. "Mr. Centeno, I'm a fairly skinny guy with long
arms. In fact, I'm six-foot tall and I weigh 117 lbs." You are pretty thin. "I want to
have more of a sense of style. My question is I know the basics, but not how to find
shirts. I'm just not comfortable in my clothing. Are there any good tailors in California?
I'm probably going to need a tailor, right?"
Just to hit this off, you're going to have a lot of trouble finding clothing and the
best place to look is going to be the young men's department. You didn’t give me an
age, but I can tell that your body type makes me assume that you're a young man and that's
where you're going to have the best chance of finding clothing that fits your body type.
Now, when it comes to suits, most suits, especially in the United States, are made to fit larger,
more filled out men, men that are your height but have an extra hundred pounds. So what
you're going to want to do and you have to do is you have to find clothing that comes
as close to fitting you in the shoulders and in the torso as possible. And then from there,
you're going to want to get it adjusted by a tailor.
You say you're in California. I don't know exactly what city, but there are plenty of
great tailors in the great State of California, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Even up north
in Redmond or in some of the smaller areas, there are great tailors. Just go to Google,
do a quick search, type in your zip code, alterations, and you're going to see a lot
of people rating them. I'll link you to an article down below on the seven things that
you need to ask any tailor before you go to them.
Just let your fingers do the walking. Go ahead and call these people and locate a tailor,
but the key with your body type is finding clothing that's going to fit you as close
as you can get it right off-the-rack because there are limitations. Now, nothing you put
on is going to make you look large. You are never going to have this problem, but what
you want to avoid is your clothing, when you put it on, that it just dwarves you. It looks
like you're wearing your older brother's clothing, but it's just falling. So in some cases, you
may even want to consider custom.
Now, I'm a custom clothier, but I may not be in the price range for you. It would probably
be worth you looking at places out of Thailand, out of Hong Kong, maybe even some of the local
American ones. There are some pretty good ones that have decent prices because for you,
more than fabric -- well, style is a close second, but fit is going to be the most important
thing. Jeans are probably one of the easier things that you're going to find, but you're
right, dress shirts are going to be very hard, so things you're going to want to look for
in a dress shirt. Like I said, shoulders and the torso. You can probably bring in two inches
in the torso area, but beyond that, it's going to be hard. This is why it's probably going
to behoove you to look at custom.
Yes, I know you're going to pay more, but to get the alterations done, you're going
to look at maybe $20 to $25 a shirt, unless you're doing it yourself. And there are a
lot of custom places out there that maybe they're not using the best fabrics, but I've
seen some of these guys. They're able to get you a pretty good custom -- well, it's more
made-to-measure shirt completed, and we're talking in the $65 to $100 range. Again, I
can't vouch for them. They're not my companies, but I can tell you that if you can get that
fit close, you're going to be good.
Now, one thing you want to be careful about, and I was alluding to it with style, is going
to be proportion. So you don't want the color to be way too large. This is again the danger
with off-the-rack, is because you're so thin, it's going to be very, very hard to find anything
that fits you in the length of your arms and then fits you in the neck. This is the area
that people are going to focus on because it's near your face, so it's very important
to get a good fit in the neck and a good sleeve length.
In fact, you can compromise a bit on the torso and you can fold it in a certain way. And
again, you can have that shirt darted, but what you can't compromise or where people
are going to be focusing on, you don't want the sleeves to be too short and you don't
want that collar to be just too loose.
When it comes to jackets, I'm not going to really go down this path because you didn’t
really ask about it, but you're going to want to look for a brand that specializes in thin
builds, so unfortunately, you're going to have to look at higher end models. Most of
the lower end jackets, go to Jos. A. Banks or the Men's Wearhouse, they're geared towards
bigger men. They try to fit as many men as possible and they're not going to achieve
that if they make a skinny suit.
You can find some pretty good skinny suit at thrift stores or other places, but at the
same time, with the skinny suits, a lot of them are coming off of fashion brands. So
then all of a sudden, you're going to want to focus on and make sure you've got the classic
style pieces because with those fashion suits, a lot of them, they just take liberties with
making really skinny lapels or wide lapels going with -- a strange-looking lapel going
with perhaps four or five buttons. You want to avoid things like that. Go for something
classic. Go for a solid navy, a solid charcoal, or you could even go with a herringbone or
a semi-solid pattern that would add a little bit of weight to your frame.
But at the end of the day, being skinny, it's harder to find clothing, but I think it's
better than being on the opposite end of the spectrum because you can always add -- and
you probably will over time add a little bit more weight, but focusing on brands which
are going to suit you. Oftentimes, they're going to be higher end labels and if you can't
afford their retail prices, look in thrift stores. If you can't look in thrift stores,
what you need to do is to scout out the sale periods in which the stores that carry them
and as soon as they drop 40%, 60% sometimes, you need to jump on it and make the purchase
then.
Hopefully that gives you a little bit of guidance. I will see you guys in the next video and
don't forget to check out my premium e-book. I'm pretty excited about this thing, 600 pages,
14 hours audio. It isn't free, but it does support my business. I thank you guys for
watching my videos and I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.