How to Pack Your Suit for Travel

Traveling with your suit can be intimidating, especially if you’re not just driving a few hours down the road.

If you are traveling by car, the answer is obvious: simply hang it up in the garment bag. But if you’re flying, you have a choice to make: garment bag, or folded into your luggage?

This really comes down to how many bags you want to bring.

Garment Bag

Hang everything up, secure it in the bag, and fold it in half. You can easily stow the folded bag overhead on airplanes, or politely ask your flight attendant if there’s room in a closet for it to hang unfolded.

Warning: Not all airplanes have closets, so if you go the garment bag route, expect to stow your suit in the overhead compartment.

Packed In Luggage

If you do it right, your garments will remain as wrinkle-free as they would in a garment bag—after all, it’s called a suit-case. We recommend packing an important suit (think weddings) in your carry-on, just in case your checked bag is lost.

1. Lay suit face down on a flat surface.

2. Fold left shoulder back.

3. Turn right shoulder inside out, then tuck left shoulder into the right.

4. Fold in half lengthwise, then fold horizontally.

5. Place folded jacket in center of outstretched trousers.

6. Fold trouser bottoms over jacket and repeat with top of trousers.

Option C: In The Black Tux Box

We specifically designed our boxes to be perfectly sized, and durable enough to protect your suit during a flight. They’ll fit in the overhead bins on most airplanes and have a nifty handle that makes them easy to carry. Just pack your suit, covered in the included garment bag, into the original box that it came in, and strut onto that plane like you own it (even if you’ve got a middle seat in coach).

Pro tip: Remove your suit from the box as soon as it arrives to avoid wrinkles or creases setting in too deep. Then, just before you leave for the airport, put it back in the box.

And even if your suit does pick up a few wrinkles along the way, just hang it up overnight. The merino wool our suits are made of is wrinkle resistant, which means the wrinkles will gradually fall out of the fabric once it’s freed from the fold.

Now that you know how to pack a suit, learn how it should fit: read our guide to talking to tailors.