How to Buy a Suede Jacket

Suede is the most forgiving outerwear material to wear and the least forgiving to buy badly. A good one softens around you for decades. A poor one goes shiny at the cuffs within a season and never recovers. The difference is visible before you buy, if you know where to look.

Start with the hide

Suede is leather finished on the inner split rather than the grain side, so the nap you are touching is the structure of the skin itself. Lambskin is the softest and the most delicate. Goat is springier and holds its shape. Sheep suede sits in between, and is what most of the jackets we carry are cut from. Press your thumb into the panel and release it: a good hide springs back without holding the mark, and the nap shifts colour as it moves, then settles.

Be suspicious of a hide that feels uniformly smooth, like brushed fabric. Heavy sanding and pigment coating can make cheap skin feel plush on the rail, but the finish sits on top rather than in the leather, and it is the first thing to wear off at the elbows and cuffs.

Weight tells you what the jacket is for

A light suede blouson is a shirt-jacket: something to put over a tee in September. A heavier aviator or trucker is real outerwear and will carry a knit underneath. Neither is better, but buying one expecting the other is the most common mistake. Pick the jacket up off the rail before you try it. The weight in your hand is a more honest signal than the photograph.

Fit: shoulder first, everything else second

The shoulder seam is the one thing a tailor cannot fix cheaply. It should sit at the edge of your shoulder, not down your arm. Everything after that is negotiable:

• Sleeves can be shortened from the cuff, though on a zip cuff that is more work than it sounds.
• The body can be taken in at the side seams on most styles.
• Length is best left alone — the hem detailing is usually part of the design.
• Raise your arms. Suede has little stretch, so if it binds across the back in the shop, it will bind forever.

Living with it

Suede wants less intervention than people expect. Brush it with a soft suede brush when the nap flattens, always in one direction. Let rain dry at room temperature, away from radiators, then brush it again once dry — water alone rarely ruins suede, but heat does. Hang it on a broad wooden hanger so the shoulders keep their shape.

Do not waterproof a new jacket on principle. Most sprays dull the nap slightly and flatten the colour, and a good hide handles light rain on its own. If you are going to treat it, test on the inside of a hem first.

Oil and grease are the real enemies, not water, and they are close to permanent. Take a stained jacket to a specialist leather cleaner rather than a general dry cleaner, and go sooner rather than later.

What we stock

We carry suede outerwear from Valstar, the Milanese house best known for the Valstarino blouson, in sheep suede shirts, overshirts and zip jackets. Cale makes a glove-leather jacket cut closer to a shirt than a coat. Both are on the rail at Mott Street, and both are in the virtual store if you would rather look first.