The tailor who taught us to cut a shoulder

Marta Moreira is 34. Her workshop is a single room above a café near the Bolhão market, with a wall of blue azulejo tiles and brown paper patterns pinned beside it. Her grandfather opened it in 1976, and she has cut suits there since she was 19. In 2020 we brought her the first jacket we had made, and asked what she thought.

What did you think?

That it was a good shirt pretending to be a jacket. The cloth was fine. But the shoulder was flat, cut like a box, and it had no idea there was a person inside it. A shoulder is not a corner. It slopes, it rolls forward, and the sleeve has to hang from it, not hang off it.

How do you fix a shoulder?

You start before the cloth is cut. The pattern needs a little more length at the back of the armhole than the front, because arms move forward, never backward. Then the sleeve head is eased in, a few millimeters of extra cloth worked into the seam, so it curves over the shoulder instead of folding at it.

What should someone look for in a suit?

Lift your arms. If the whole jacket rises with them, the armhole is too low and too big. A good jacket lets your arm move and leaves the body where it is. Then sit down. If the buttons strain, it will not be comfortable at dinner, whatever it looks like in the shop.

She redrew our jacket pattern over 3 weeks, at her table, in pencil. Every jacket and waistcoat we have made since starts from it.