Fit: If you’re not sure how to size, here’s how you can zero in on the right fit. First, measure your chest with a tape measure. That number should get you to your approximate chest size. As for length, guys under 5’8″ will likely need a short size, and dudes above 6’2″ will likely need a long size. Keep in mind these are just guidelines to help you narrow down the right size. What matters more is not the number on the tag, but the actual fit of the garment. Try on as much as you can. Go a size up and a size down. Definitely don’t assume you’ll be the same jacket size between brands, or styles.
How We Test and Review Products
Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.
Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.
How We Make These Picks
We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.
To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about what hangs in their closets.
We lean on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.
Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.
Whatever your preferences, whatever your style, there’s bound to be a superlative version on this list for you. (Read more about GQ’s testing process here.)
Best Blazers FAQ
What’s the difference between a blazer, a sport coat, and a suit jacket?
If you posed the question above to five different people, you’d get six definitions—none of them all that helpful. The terms tend to be used interchangeably—though, as the most knowledgeable and/or pedantic menswear obsessives will point out, that’s not technically the case. Here’s the historical breakdown.
- Blazers: Menswear purists will insist that a blazer should be cut from solid navy wool with gold- or silver-tone buttons. This is the archetypal blue-blooded joint your boat shoe-wearing college roommate rocked to his family reunion at the yacht club. These days, though, the word “blazer” is often used to refer to any standalone tailored jacket that’s not paired with matching pants.
- Sport coats: For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that sport coats are just like blazers—they don’t have matching pants—but patterned. They also skew a bit more casual, so they’re particularly well-suited (sorry) to wearing with jeans, chinos, or your flashiest pair of trackpants, Richie Tenenbaum style.
- Suit jackets: Suit jackets are the part of the suit you don’t put your legs through. They’re also the most formal of the tailoring options here, and in general, we wouldn’t suggest wearing a suit jacket that’s sold only as part of a two-piece set by itself. Suits sold as “separates”—where you can mix-and-match the sizing of on a matching jacket and pants—are often made from fabrics that let the individual pieces work as well solo as they do together.
What should I wear with a blazer?
The trick to wearing a blazer is treat it like any other (non-formal) jacket you own. A classic white button-up and a pair of well-fitting, non-freaked-out pants will steer you right for most moments when the dress code is asking you to look nice but not fully formal. When you’re wearing a blazer just because (in our opinion, the best time to wear a blazer), then just about anything goes. Graphic tee, polo, dress shirt or mesh shirt, tank top (or maybe no top!); jeans to cords to high-waisted trousers; any shoe in your rotation short of your toasted errand-running sneakers—the blazer really can handle it all.
What the heck are travel blazers?
Travel blazers (and, by extension, travel suits) are made for, well, traveling. That means they’re built for comfort when you’re crammed in coach 35,000 feet up. They’ll likely be unstructured, without much shoulder padding (if any) and without the internal canvas layer that usually gives suit jackets a distinct shape. Modern travel blazers also tend to use blended fabrics that resist wrinkling and weave in a bit of stretch (not unlike some jeans) so that the jacket feels—and moves—more like a shirt. The caveat is that a travel blazer that’s gone too far done the athleisure road can look chintzy and look too much like a shirt, to the point that it’s not really elevating your outfit the way a better blazer could.
