Wardrobe · 4 min
The blazer that does everything
Most wardrobes contain four jackets doing one job badly. One should do all four.
What I would keep
One structured jacket in a colour that flatters your skin, cut to your actual shoulder.
What I would change
The three near-identical alternatives you bought because none of them quite fit.
Why
A jacket that fits the shoulder needs nothing else to look considered. A jacket that doesn't cannot be rescued by anything.
The shoulder is the only part of a jacket that cannot be altered cheaply, and it is the part everyone reads first. Everything else — sleeve, waist, length — is negotiable with a good tailor. The shoulder is the decision.
When clients show me their jackets, there are almost always several, and almost always none they reach for. Each one was bought as a solution to the last one's failure. None of them were bought as the answer.
Buy the answer. One jacket, correct in the shoulder, in a colour that belongs to you, in a fabric that survives a full day. It will carry a meeting, a dinner, a flight and a funeral, and it will outlast the four it replaces.
This is what an edit is for: not to take things away, but to stop you buying the same mistake a fifth time.