The fitted jacket is the height of the tailors art.

I had a friend who was a proper time served tailor and to watch her at work was amazing.

The cloth of a jacket is pressed and eased and moulded, there is stiffening and suport added, the lining is not the same size as the outer and although it is smaller in outline, in places it has to have extra fabric folded gathered or eased in to allow the same amount of movement as the outer or it will eventually split.

The key to the jacket is the shoulders - if they are wrong the jacket will never hang right. It is rare for a person to have shoulders at exactly the same height and making a slight adjustment to counteract the tilt that puts into a jacket will make it look a lot better.

One of my friend's customers needed his jackets altered to have an inch and a half taken off one side - and that was done by separating the inner and outer structure and easing in the wool outer, then recutting the underpinning and replacing the sleeve unchanged.

From watching TV I see that the average American wears a jacket which is looser in the body and less shaped than the average European. The shoulders are more rigid, so it seems that the shape of the wearer is less important than the styling of the jacket in the US.

Making a jacket from scratch is a considerable undertaking, if the result is to look well made.

Having someone to help with the fitting who can see where the shape is wrong and deduce how to correct it would be a great advantage, though there are some sewing books from past decades which give numerous 'figure faults' which are shown up in wrinkling of close fitted garments and give the ways to alter the clothes to smooth them out. I'm sure I have several in my library, but such books very rarely go into the area of men's jackets as it is usually beyond the average dressmaker.