On Making: The Basted Jacket

Before a jacket is sewn it is basted: held together with long white stitches so it can be tried, pulled apart, and corrected. The thread is meant to be removed. We photograph it because the basted stage is when the jacket is most honest about how it was made.

A half-canvassed chest is three layers — cloth, horsehair canvas, domette — that have to move independently and still return to the same shape. The canvas is attached with a pad stitch worked by hand, at roughly eleven stitches to the inch. It takes about forty minutes per side and it is the reason the chest holds its line after five years.

Everything after that is subtraction. The basting comes out, the seams are pressed open over a ham, and the jacket stops looking like a set of instructions.