Part of the pleasure in wearing a made to measure garment – beyond the near transcendent experience of achieving a perfect fit – lies in reliving the deeply personal experience of its making each time you put it on. It’s for that reason that bespoke tailoring, like the product of any other artisanal craft, is so often likened to ‘luxury’ in the truest sense of the word – it’s almost as though a part of you, as much as the expertise of the maker, has been sewn into the lining of a garment. For fans of made to measure tailoring, few experiences could arguably compare to having the Master Tailor at Prada size you up.

Although Prada’s made-to-measure service is available in their flagship Sydney store all year round as one of the 48 stores around the world that offer the service, Master Tailor, Giorgio Ascheri, has made himself available for private appointments for one week only in both Sydney and Melbourne. Like the label itself, Prada’s ‘Made to Measure’ service conflates the best of Italian sartorial tradition with contemporaneity of style, and its possibilities run a gamut from made to measure suits and coats to jackets, trousers, formal and casual shirts – the latter in the shape of Prada’s Bowling Shirts, here able to be made in a variety of iconic archival prints.

Where suits and jackets are concerned, the service offers a client the chance to choose from over 300 fabric options, from the classic Kid Mohair and textured wools to exquisite Vicuña, Guanaco and Guanashina, as well as a range of wools up to Super 210S. All items are constructed over several steps by hand in a process that entails hundreds of different stages be executed by expert tailors. As such, suits and coats can take up to six weeks to complete; prices on suits and winter coats start from $4500 through to $85,000.

A further 30 fabric options are available for coats and another 230 are available for crafting shirts in three models, classic, slim and bowling fit, and all can be made short-sleeved. True fans of the label will delight in the possibility of plumbing the archives of Prada’s signature prints, the exhaustive selection of which is considered the showpiece of the ‘Made-to-Measure’ service. Once the measurements are taken, a customer can select their preferred model before honing in on the finest details of collar and cuff. For the fastidious, further details are available on request, including the option of having the shirt monogrammed or having a chest pocket added. Shirts can take up to five weeks to complete

The ‘Made To Measure’ service is available at Prada Collins Street, Melbourne, from May 9-10. To schedule an appointment, call (03) 9663 0978 between 10am to 6pm. It is also available at Prada Sydney Westfield from May 11-12. To schedule an appointment, call (02) 9223 8322, 9.30am to 6.30pm. More information is available here.

Tile and cover image: Paolo Barbi/Courtesy of Prada