ABOUT
SCARBOROUGH

Christian Scarborough Gardner has been working in custom menswear since 2008. That’s a lot of years spent thinking about things most people probably never notice.

A client might see a great jacket. Christian sees the shoulder line, where the lapel sits, how much shirt cuff is showing, the length of the coat and whether the trousers are sitting where they should. He has strong opinions about these things.

In 2018, he started Scarborough Custom Tailoring in San Francisco. The name comes from his middle name and an extended family name with roots in Northern England. The Scarborough family came from the Halifax area of Yorkshire, a part of England with a long history in wool and textiles. Given Christian’s love of English tailoring and beautiful cloth, the name made sense.

His own taste leans toward soft shoulders, generous lapels, jackets with a little more length and trousers worn higher on the waist with an easy drape. He loves a double-breasted suit, a proper trouser, a great sport coat and formalwear that doesn’t feel like a costume. There’s plenty of English influence, some of the ease of Italian tailoring, and a fondness for the proportions of an earlier era of menswear.

But the clothes aren’t about getting a client to dress like Christian. They’re about figuring out what works for the person standing in front of him.

Because at the end of the day, our goal is to make exceptional clothes you actually want to wear. There’s something different about putting on a garment that was considered specifically for you. We’ll talk about what you need, how you want it to feel, choose a cloth, work through fit and proportion, and decide on the details that make sense for the way you dress. Then we take it from there.

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