France ★

The Parisian cut

Paris cuts for effect. The house style associated with the city, most visibly at Cifonelli and Camps de Luca, combines a strongly built, rounded shoulder with a very clean, close chest and a high, narrow waist. The shoulder is the signature: sculpted rather than padded flat, with a pronounced roll at the sleeve head that Cifonelli in particular made famous. The effect is theatrical in a way English tailoring is not and Italian tailoring does not attempt. It also requires an enormous amount of hand labour, which is part of why the Parisian houses sit at the top of the European price range.

A trade that nearly disappeared

France once had a large bespoke trade; by the late twentieth century it had contracted to a handful of houses. Several of the survivors are Italian in origin (the Cifonelli family came from Rome, the Camps family from Spain), which is one reason the Parisian style is neither straightforwardly Latin nor English.

The revival since the 2000s has been real but small. The constraint is the same everywhere: trained coatmakers and trouser makers take years to produce and there are not many left.

Shirts, leather and the luxury houses

Charvet, founded in Paris in 1838, was the first shop to make shirts to measure on the premises for customers who walked in, and remains the reference point for bespoke shirtmaking. Its Place Vendôme premises hold one of the largest ranges of shirting cloth anywhere.

France's other menswear contribution is at the corporate scale. Hermès and Berluti (the latter within LVMH) sit at the top of the leather trade, and the French luxury groups own a considerable part of what is sold as Italian and British menswear. Ownership and manufacturing are different questions, and the brand pages here separate them.