Having clothes made in Vietnam, and the week it needs

The pitch is a suit in 24 hours. The reality is that a suit in 24 hours gets one fitting, and one fitting is how a garment ends up in the back of a wardrobe at home.

Vietnamese tailoring is genuinely good value and genuinely skilled. It just needs the one thing a trip rarely gives it, which is time.

What does a tailored suit cost?

Three to nine million dong in Hoi An, and the spread is almost entirely cloth: the fabric sets the price, not the work.

At about 26,000 dong to the dollar, that suit range is 115 to 350 dollars. The gap between the bottom and the top of it is almost entirely cloth, so the question to ask is never how much for a suit but which fabrics you have at this price.

How long does it really take?

Three days for a shirt or a simple dress. A week for a suit you intend to wear at home. The famous overnight service is real and it is the wrong product: it compresses three fittings into one and removes every chance to correct anything.

The sequence that works is measurement on day one, a first fitting on day two or three with the garment half-made, and a final fitting with small adjustments after that. If the shop cannot fit that into your dates, order less.

Where should you go?

Hoi An has several hundred tailors in a town you can walk across in twenty minutes, and that concentration is why it is famous. The things to do page covers where they sit in a visit; this page is what to do once you are in one.

The quieter alternative is a neighbourhood shop in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, used by Vietnamese customers rather than visitors. Prices are similar, English is patchier, and the work is often better because the shop is not turning over forty tourists a week.

Fabric markets are the third route for anyone confident: buy the cloth yourself at a market, then pay a tailor for labour alone. The textiles guide covers what is woven where, and the shopping guide covers haggling on the cloth itself.

How do you get a good result?

Bring evidence. A photograph of the cut you want, and better still a garment that already fits you, settles more in two minutes than a conversation settles in twenty. Shops expect both and will copy a jacket seam for seam.

Be specific, too, about the things that go wrong quietly: the lining, the buttons, the trouser rise, whether the jacket is half or fully canvassed. Ask to see the cloth roll rather than a swatch card, and ask what the blend actually is — a wool-polyester mix at a pure-wool price is the most common disappointment.

Move in the fitting. Sit down, reach forward, do the jacket up. A garment can look right standing still in a mirror and be wrong the moment you use it.

When in the trip should you order?

At the start. Order in Hoi An on day one, go to Hue or the caves for three days, come back for the final fitting on the way south. That is the shape that produces clothes people actually wear.

The alternative — ordering on the last day — is how the country's reputation for badly fitting suits was built. With a flight the next morning nobody sends anything back, and the shop knows it.

Is it worth doing at all?

For an ao dai, without question, and it is the one garment that only makes sense made here. For a suit, if you have the week and you would otherwise buy one at home anyway.

For a wardrobe of shirts bought because they are cheap, less often than people expect. The packing guide is blunt about how much luggage a trip absorbs, and five shirts that were a bargain in Hoi An are five shirts you carry for a fortnight.