Who makes the cut?

Even as a cisgender female, a woman whose gender identity matches her birth-assigned sex, I've never dreamt of a white dress on my wedding day, so when I got engaged, friends suggested I instead splurge on a custom suit. I excitedly researched local tailors with images of sexily suited Diane Keaton, Rhianna and Ellen Page in my mind. But, it was difficult to find tailors in Toronto who would craft a suit for me. Out of the 11 stores I contacted, only three said they make suits for women; four only made suits for men and the others responded with discouraging variations on "We could make you suits, but we usually just do it for men."

I was baffled by the response. Suiting for women is not a new outlandish trend. Women working in business wear suits every day. If their male colleagues could get a custom suit, why were so many tailors reluctant to do the same for them? How could a craft that prided itself on creating one-of-a-kind garments be so intimidated by a different gender or body type?

My search for answers and a wedding suit led me to Trend Custom Tailors in Toronto, one of very few tailors that promotes its custom garments for women. Owner Don Lee explains that the craft's failure to be inclusive is largely due to the way it has been traditionally learned. The older generation of tailors learned suit-making skills from older men who likely never cut clothes for women. Many of them built a decades-long business out of making the same garment with various measurements and few want to take on new challenges.

"Tailors don't go to school to become tailors, so it depends on who they learned from. A lot of them learn one aspect of tailoring," Lee says. "For me, if you want to call yourself a tailor, you should be able to cut for men and women as well."

I'm not the only one to be challenged by this search. "My experience was going into a department store, looking at off-the-rack suits and realizing none of them would fit me," says Rae Tutera, who was also looking to get suited for a wedding. "They ended up sending me to the department where they sold boys' suits. I was 25 years old, I didn't feel comfortable shopping in the same place as a boy."

This was Tutera's first attempt at getting suited. The Brooklynite, who identifies as transmasculine – and prefers the pronoun "they" over "he" or "she" – eventually went to a tailor recommended by a friend. Tutera says the bespoke garment changed their relationship with their clothes and body. However, the experience also showed them how difficult it was for anyone who was not a cis male to get a suit made.

Tutera's search for a better experience and suit made its way to Bindle and Keep, the New York-based tailor owned by Canadian expat Daniel Friedman. Tutera began apprenticing at the atelier in late 2012, around the same time Maine became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage.

"I would read The New York Times and see many women wearing suits in their wedding photos," Friedman says. "I'm sure so many people told them they looked handsome, but they didn't look handsome at all." The problem, he says, was that women were getting put in suits for men. To accommodate their larger busts, women were buying jackets that were too big in the shoulders. "They looked like the guy at the end of Beetlejuice," he says.

After joining the shop, Tutera blogged about the experience. The attention drew more women and LGBT clientele to Bindle and Keep, and Friedman ultimately developed a method for making suits for all body types.

"It's not that we specialize in the LGBT community; that's not our core mission. Our mission is that we can put a suit on anybody," says Friedman. The company still dresses Wall Street bankers, lawyers and entertainers of all shapes and genders. "We don't care what your gender identity is, we don't care about anything except how you want to feel," he says. (Bindle and Keep's inclusivity has drawn much media attention – and a starring role in the documentary Suited, a film co-produced by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, which airs on HBO this month.)

Personal attentiveness from competent tailors help customers get to the core of their desires to wear bespoke clothing. At both Trend Custom Tailors and Bindle and Keep, it starts not with the measurements but with a conversation that helps tailors understand the needs and desires of their clients.

In our first meeting with Lee, my partner and I spent an hour talking about the wedding, our personal styles and the craft of tailoring before we got to picking fabrics and measurements. Three hours later, we left dazed by the new experience and $1,000 poorer after putting our deposits down for three-piece suits that would eventually cost around $2,500 each.

When we returned for our first fitting, we tried on what would eventually become our jackets, each just cut for sizing, not adorned with anything – not even a lapel. As I pulled the garment on, I had an unfamiliar feeling: Although the sleeves were literally hanging by a thread, the jacket fit.

"I don't think I've ever seen anything fit your torso so well," my partner said.

Don smirked, it was just the beginning: "You're goin' to look killer."