This research explores women’s becomings through tailored suits. Previous research on women’s engagement with the suit has attributed the practice to masculinity, with the consequences of such association limiting women’s embodiment of the item to masculine representations, thereby neglecting women as full subjects within contexts of tailoring. The aim of the study, then, is to remove the suit from the hold of a masculine symbolic. This aim is realized by exploring how historical, cultural and societal factors influence the assumptions made about women’s subjectivity within the context of tailoring and how women respond to these assumptions. This task is guided by a feminist theoretical framework of sexual difference and phenomenology of embodiment, as outlined in Chapter 1, 'Theoretical Framework’. The research is carried out through the multiple, collective methods, described in detail in Chapter 2, ‘Methodology, Methods and Material’, and involve ethnographic observations of and conversations with tailors in their workshops, auto-ethnographic reflections of the author’s own experience with having a suit tailor-made throughout the research process, and semi-structured interviews with women who have had a suit tailor-made.

Chapter 3, ‘Imagining Tailoring’, brings into question the tailoring imaginary which shapes tailoring practices, and it sheds light on the perceived—albeit implicit—ideal body of tailoring. Examining different forms of representation, such as imagery and artefacts observed at tailors’ shops as well as references to certain historical myths encountered during ethnographic fieldwork, the relation between tailoring imaginaries that are informed by a heritage of masculinization and contemporary tailoring practices is problematized. The chapter importantly reveals how the implementation of mathematical processes into the tailor’s craft sustains the idea of the male body as ideal.

Chapter 4, ‘At the Tailor’s Shop’, brings into relief women’s descriptions of their experiences with the tailored suit within the context of tailoring, considering the cultural, social and personal dimensions of their embodiment. Here, focus is placed on women’s gendered experiences of having a suit tailored for themselves as well as on tailors’ descriptions of how they tailor suits for women. What the discussion reveals is the ways in which sexual difference was not only imagined by tailors but defined and maintained within the tailoring environment through practices of measuring, patternmaking, and fitting specifically sexed bodies as well as within the organization of the work. 

Women’s dressing practices and positioning of themselves as subjects through the tailored suit are the focus of Chapter 5, ‘Sartorial Becomings’. Material analysis reveals how socially assigned feminine roles restricted women yet, at the same time, provided a useful avenue for overcoming stereotypes. The tailored suit, operating within a masculine imaginary yet embodied by women within that same framework, became a crucial tool for women to position themselves at the intervals between masculine/feminine, thereby living out and bringing into representation the multiplicity of their subjectivities. In this process, women’s adoption of the tailored suit enabled women an overcoming of gendered stereotypes and a reimagining of the suit in terms of feminine difference.

Overall, the research demonstrates the various structures which constitute women’s experiences, including how tailors approach the construction of the suit, how women respond to their social environments within tailoring as well as in their everyday lives, and how women embody gender through their adoption of the suit. By bringing these various dynamics to light, what is learnt from the study is how women, through their suit-wearing practices, actively rework the imaginary of the suit in ways that nurture women's subjectivity and cultivate new modes of feminine embodiment.