Hard to tell fit from that pic but generally I've always thought that Will wears his jackets a touch too long.

Not everyone can wear drape.

A stouter figure risks looking even portlier by wearing drape. It may be possible that the drape cut was originally invented as a corpulent cut. By expanding out the chest more, this allowed it to compete with the waist better. However, it is very controversial whether this really does work or whether it just makes the corpulent figure look even bigger. The vast majority of cutters have abandoned this once popular practice long ago.

Figures with sloped shoulders hold up the drape poorly, and old texts suggest that you may need extra shoulder padding for this. If someone insists on "natural shoulders" because that is what the internet "cognoscenti" demand, this can create a very messy situation. When a figure like Will's with both rounded and sloped shoulders wears unpadded shoulders, it tends to create this very sad and sagging shoulder line of a sort that you don't see on old coats made by Scholte, for example. The folds of drape can become exaggerated into deep, messy drags. Publications from the heyday of drape in the 1930-50s clearly did not consider this acceptable.

As for cotton and linen for coats, I agree with FNB that modern tropical weight wools are much better. There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, cotton and linen as summer suiting is historical. These fibres used to able to be woven lighter than woollens, which could only be woven as light as 16 Oz. As weaving technology improved, it could be woven as light as 13 Oz, then 10 Oz etc. It used to be cooler to wear cotton and linen than "light weight" 13-16 Oz woollens. The fact that woollens can now be woven in really light weights makes the use of cotton and linen largely redundant and historical in my opinion. Wool runs cooler than cotton and linen.

Next, wool makes up better than cotton or linen. You can do a lot more manipulation of woollens with the iron than washing fabrics. You have to cut washing fabrics differently, just as you would a pure synthetic cloth, to take into account the fact that you can't shape it much with the iron. A woollen cloth will always looks shapelier.

That means that the only reason to wear cotton and linen garments is so that you can wash them or so that you can do the iGent thing and wear linen coats like our grandfathers.

Interestingly, it seems that there was once a time when British tailors tended to regard the cutting of cotton and linen coats to be a shirtmaker's work rather than a tailor's. Coats of this nature were termed "tropical lounge coats" or "Palm Beach jackets". This may have been the historical origins of a sleeve being set like a shirt sleeve. The Italians quite possibly merely copied it off the English. The English coat with a shirtmaker's shoulder has not survived the end of the British Empire, perhaps as those tropical parts of the Empire became independent. As technology progressed, woollens also started to be woven in tropical weights so that tailors could take over from the shirtmakers in making tropical garments. It would not be surprising if the survival of the British shirtmaker's tropical lounge jacket in Naples was like a living fossil - not surprisingly found in a warmer southern habitat.

Sator,

Interesting analysis thank you. I admit to rather liking the look of a linen jacket - not for warmth or cool (rarely an issue in the UK) but because the slub and the wrinkle makes it that bit less formal.

I always understood that tailoring was there to make you look good. It seems to me to be the height of foolishness to insist on a particular cut or shoulder - you are paying a man to help you wear what flatters you and his opinion is to be respected. He, in turn, should gently guide you away from what does not flatter you and not impose a style on you that does not deliver. If he cannot accommodate you then he should cheerfully send you elsewhere.

That the igentry lack the self-confidence and taste to behave like this is irrelevant. I don't go to the opera to hear the man in the stalls sing either.