Forum threads a decade old, numbers with no explanation. We would rather answer it properly.
In Mumbai today, a garment honestly made bespoke — a pattern drafted for you alone, cut by hand, built through fittings — begins around the price of a good ready-to-wear designer suit and rises with the cloth. The cloth is the variable. A suit in a dependable Indian-milled worsted and the same suit in a Loro Piana or Dormeuil cloth are the same labour and very different invoices. At RAJASAB, each commission is priced at the atelier once the cloth is chosen, and you are told the figure before a single chalk line is drawn. No number here would be honest without the cloth in front of us — which is precisely the point.
The cloth. Half the conversation. Mill, fibre, weight, weave. A 280-gram tropical worsted for Bombay heat is a different animal — and a different price — from a winter flannel. The books at the atelier run from serious Indian mills to Loro Piana, Ermenegildo Zegna, Vitale Barberis Canonico and Dormeuil.
The pattern. In true bespoke, a paper pattern is drafted from your measurements and kept for life. It is why your third suit fits better than your first. Made-to-measure adjusts a factory block; bespoke starts from nothing but you.
The hands. A bespoke coat passes through a master cutter and karigars who do nothing else. Hand-padded lapels, hand-set sleeves, buttonholes sewn rather than punched. Hours, not minutes.
The fittings. Two to three sittings, each one a correction the machine-made garment never receives. This is where "it fits" becomes "it disappears on the body".
Ask three questions. Will a pattern be drafted for me and kept? How many fittings, on my body? May I see the canvas? A fused, one-fitting, seven-day suit can be a perfectly good suit — but it is made-to-measure, and it should be priced like it. If the quote seems too fast and too low for hand-work, it is not hand-work.
If you wear a suit a few times a year, made-to-measure may serve you. If the suit is for the days that matter — a wedding, a career, a life in rooms where clothes are read — bespoke is the difference between wearing a suit and the suit belonging to you.
Roughly four to five weeks for a suit, with two to three fittings, and the house holds a week in hand before your date on purpose. Wedding work in season wants more runway. The Commission Planner will tell you honestly whether your date is workable — and urgent commissions, when the house takes them on, are the exception and carry a premium.
Directions ↗The house will write to you to confirm the hour.