The Tailored Man was founded in 1969 on Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia. By the time I took it over, the shop had already been working for more than four decades, and that's the part of the story that mattered to me. I didn't want to start a new label. I wanted to keep a working room going.

The shop sits at 1750 Tysons Boulevard, Suite 130, not inside the Galleria, but a quiet floor in the office tower across the way. By appointment only. The room is built for one conversation at a time.

Day to day, the work is fabric selection, fittings, design choices, and a long list of small decisions about lapel widths, lining colors, and whether a client really wants a ticket pocket on his second suit. Some days it's a phone call about a delivery window. Some days it's a house visit when a client can't make it to Tysons.

But the measurements aren't the business. The relationships are. I've built suits for first job interviews, wedding rehearsal dinners, swearings-in, and Tuesday-morning calendars where nothing much happens but the suit still needs to do its job. That work doesn't happen if I'm chasing transactions. It happens because someone trusts me with what he wears, and he tells his friends.

Every photograph on this site is a real client wearing a garment we made for him. No stock imagery, no aspirational mood boards. If a suit is on the page, somebody owns it and wears it.

Clients come for different reasons.

Some live in a suit four or five days a week and want one wardrobe of garments they genuinely love rather than five they simply tolerate. Others come for a single occasion: a wedding weekend, a milestone, a swearing-in, a state dinner, a piece that has to do real work on a day that matters.

Both are ultimately looking for the same thing: clothing that holds up.

Most of the work comes out of 22102, but the client base stretches across Washington, Northern Virginia, Maryland, and farther out when the project is the right fit.

Most commissions land between $1,295 and $1,995. At the top, a fully handmade commission in an exceptional cloth runs past $4,000. The level of care stays the same at either end. What changes is the fabric story, the construction, and the level of handwork involved.

The clients vary widely. A recent graduate preparing for a first interview. A groom heading into a wedding weekend. A father of the bride. A Michelin-starred chef. A Washington bureau chief dressing for camera. Members of Congress, attorneys, executives, and clients who simply want a better relationship with the clothes they wear.

Different lives, different demands, but all coming in for the same reason: they need the work to hold up.

One of those clients, the groom who wore a rust three-piece to a wedding weekend in Portugal, is written up in the journal.

Before tailoring became my profession, it was my fascination.

I grew up in Southern Indiana, where clothing represented something larger to me from an early age. Sophistication. Aspiration. Reinvention. When I was eight years old, my grandmother asked what I wanted for my birthday, and I told her I wanted a suit.

Long before I understood construction or cloth, I understood what clothing could do to a person.

Years later, before the Kentucky Derby in 2009, I had my first custom suit made. Financially, it was not a responsible decision. But the moment I put it on, something clicked. There is a feeling that comes from wearing something made specifically for you, from beautiful fabric, with the right balance of timelessness and individuality, that is difficult to explain until you experience it yourself.

I often joke that I sold my soul that day.

Not long afterward, my life changed unexpectedly. A close friend of mine, Gerry, who owned a clothing store in Louisville, became terminally ill. I had recently moved to Washington and was beginning a new chapter of my life when his family approached me about returning home to help manage the business.

At first, I said no.

Moving home so soon felt, at least to me, like failure. But they came back with another proposition: what if the business became mine?

At twenty-five, I was too young to fully appreciate all the ways it could go wrong, which may have been exactly what allowed me to say yes.

The shop had naturally suffered during Gerry’s illness, and I learned the trade the way many older clothiers once did: by immersion. Day by day. Client by client. Mistake by mistake. Over time, I rebuilt the business, modernized it, and discovered something I had never expected. I was good at it.

In 2025 and again in 2026, the shop was voted Best Men's Custom Clothier by the readers of DC Modern Luxury.

Over the years, the work has been covered in The New York Times (in the coverage of James Comey's book party), The Washington Post, DC Modern Luxury, FOX 5, and Business First of Louisville. But the run I'm proudest of isn't the press. It's continuous operation under the same name since 1969, in the same trade, on the same stretch of suburban Washington. Houses don't last that long without earning it.