There is a thing casting directors say when a fitting goes wrong: "The suit is wearing him." Everyone nods gravely and nobody defines it. I'd like to have a go, because I think I know exactly what it is, and it's smaller than people imagine. The difference between wearing a suit and being worn by one is about four millimetres, distributed across your body in places you've never thought about.
Start with the collar. A jacket collar should touch the back of your shirt collar - touch it, like a polite hand on a shoulder, not grip it. If there's a gap you can post a letter through, the jacket is riding away from you, and in photographs you'll look like a boy borrowing his father's clothes no matter how many campaigns you've done. Most models don't know this, so they respond to "the shoulders look off" by adjusting their shoulders, which is like fixing a crooked painting by tilting your head.
Because I grew up making these things, I cheat. When a jacket doesn't fit - and samples often don't, they're cut for the ghost of an average - I know where it doesn't fit, and I can place my body where the jacket expects a body to be. Drop the right shoulder half a centimetre because the sleeve was set slightly forward. Soften the knees so the trouser line runs unbroken. It looks, on camera, like the suit was made for me. It wasn't. We've simply come to an arrangement, the suit and I, and I'm the one who speaks its language.
This is the part of my job I can't explain at dinner parties without a prop. People think modelling clothes is about having the right body. It's closer to being a translator: the designer had an intention, the sample half-remembers it, and my job is to stand in a way that lets the camera hear it clearly. Every hour I ever spent on the shop floor watching my grandfather pin a customer - watching him build the man up to the jacket, never the jacket down to the man - was training for this, decades before either of us knew it.
So, who's wearing whom? The honest answer is that it's a negotiation, held in millimetres, settled before the first frame. The camera only ever photographs the winner.