Off the scale

I can't remember exactly why Porthos wanted a frock coat. I mean, yes, he is a semi-pro countertenor (and a very good one at that), so he does sing on the stage; but I'm fairly sure it wasn't for that. But, anyway, for whatever reason, Porthos wanted a frock coat, and his mother at the time was too busy to make him the whole thing (though she did end up doing the finishing, for reasons of distance - I don't live very near Porthos). So this was where I came in.

Now, as I've mentioned before, Porthos used to be a very big chap indeed. You got a lot of him to hug. He's tall, but even so, at his heaviest he was tipping the scale at almost 200 kg, which is a lot even for a tall chap. Since all this happened he's had bariatric surgery and lost more than enough weight to make an entire d'Artagnan, and now he's just big, but what you might call standard-issue big. Nothing out of the ordinary. But in those days... well, you literally could not buy a pattern to fit him.

By that point I was pretty experienced at altering patterns to fit me, but super-plus-sized countertenors were another matter. Nonetheless, I was very happy to have a go. I explained that I'd have to make a toile first, because I was not confident about getting all the alterations right first time; so we sallied forth and bought the pattern (I'm amazed they still do it!), some nice fabric in Porthos' favourite colour, buttons, gold braid... and a goodly bight of unbleached calico for the three-dimensional equivalent of scribbling.

Actually, altering the pattern for the frock coat itself turned out to be pretty simple. All I needed was added width. Rather surprisingly, I didn't need to muck about with the armscyes at all; he does have wide shoulders, so I could get away with putting all the extra in the middle of the pattern piece, so that the shoulder seams ended up wider but that was all.

But he also wanted the knee breeches, and on that, I confess, I fell apart a little. Porthos was, at that time, built like one of those Weebles that wobbled but did not fall over; he had most of his extra weight round his middle, so he appeared to have very short legs. (He didn't and doesn't, but I still had to ensure that the crotch seam was a lot lower than normal, as well as making sure it fitted properly round the midriff. When you're carrying that much weight around the middle, it drops.) So that turned out to be a bit of a nightmare to get right, plus I didn't taper it anywhere near as much as I should have done. Yes, he did have big thighs, but not in proportion to his waist/hips. So he tried on the toile for the knee breeches, and we both looked at them and fell about laughing, and at this point his mother rang.

Porthos' mother is Russian. She was actually born in Siberia, and managed to get out by dint of becoming a first-class translator and then marrying an Englishman. I've heard a few horror stories from her childhood. So Porthos is totally bilingual (well, that is to say, he was brought up totally bilingual; he's very good at languages, so he knows a few more now), and whenever he talks to his mother they just code-switch all the time. It's not rude. It's just, that's what they do, that's what they've done since he was born, that's how it works for them. If you don't understand what they're saying, all you do is you wait till they switch back to English; it won't be long.

So he picks up his mobile and says "Zdrastvuitye, mama," and there are sounds coming from the other end that are clearly Russian. And he nods, and then he starts talking.

"Russian russian russian russian russian russian. Russian russian russian. Russian russian bermuda shorts russian russian."

I understood only two words in all that, but he was quite right. That was exactly what they looked like.

So I measured him just above the knee and I said I'd taper them a bit more; they actually weren't bad round the midriff. The coat, however, was the priority. I had that mostly sewn up by the next time I saw him; if I recall correctly there were just a few potential alterations. However, after that I wasn't going to see him again for some time, so we ended up having a bit of a discussion with Russian Mama (in English; I do know a bit of Russian, but not a lot), and she agreed to a) finish off the coat and b) make the knee breeches based on my current version of the toile (which was, of course, by now a lot better). And she had a sewing machine, anyway, so she could do it a lot faster than I could.

Even though I didn't get to finish the job (I'll admit, I'd have liked to, but he wanted the outfit for some event or other and it wasn't practicable for me to do it in the time due to the fitting issues), I still learnt an awful lot from that experience; and the main thing was that, actually, there's more than one way of carrying a lot of weight. I knew that in an abstract kind of way, but this was the first time I'd come up against it in terms of fitting, and it did concentrate my mind wonderfully. Athos was, and indeed still is, also a very big chap, but he is a very big chap in an entirely different way. He's big all over, and consequently pretty much in proportion. This makes it a bit easier for him, as, all right, he still has to go to specialist big-and-tall shops for his clothes, but clothes from such places do tend to fit him. Whereas Porthos... he's more or less in proportion these days, but at that point his proportions were quite a long way off the average, and the really big fitting problem was his legs, which wasn't really what I'd expected. Because you had that weight drop that meant you had to lower the crotch seam, and because his legs were just nowhere near in the same proportion to his waist and hip measurements as the proportion that had been drafted in the pattern.

Anyway. I said to Porthos, "If I ever get married again, will you be my head bridal attendant?"

"I'd be honoured," he replied. "Can I wear a pretty dress?"

I wasn't entirely sure at that point, but the answer is now definitely: yes. I feel a whole lot more confident about the idea of making him one!