Ten garments that get you through almost any week

Buy in this order: fit, then fabric, then brand. Brand comes last because it's the only one of the three you can see from across a room, which is exactly why people get it backwards.

Ten pieces will cover work, church, a funeral, a first date, a Saturday, a flight, and dinner with your in-laws. Not ten outfits. Ten garments that combine. If each one fits properly and the colours are quiet, they stack in most directions without you thinking about it.

What follows is the list, plus the specific fit check for each, and the failure that ruins it. If you're shopping women's sizing the order of operations is identical, and the shoulder and the hem are still the two places a shop can't talk you round.

The oxford shirt

One in white, one in pale blue if you wear shirts often.

Fit check: the shoulder seam sits on the outside edge of your shoulder bone, not down your arm, not up on the muscle. The cuff ends at the base of your thumb when your arm hangs straight, and it should catch on your hand when unbuttoned. You want a flat hand's worth of slack at the waist. More than that and it billows when you tuck.

Fabric: oxford cloth is a heavier, slightly textured weave. It's forgiving, it looks fine slightly rumpled, and it survives being worn open over a tee. Poplin is smoother and dressier but shows every wrinkle.

What goes wrong: people buy by neck size and accept whatever the body does. A shirt two sizes too big in the torso doesn't read as relaxed, it reads as borrowed.

The two knits

A merino crewneck and a heavyweight plain t-shirt. Between them they handle nine months of the year.

The sweater should end at your hip bone and the sleeve at your wrist bone. If the hem hangs over your seat, it drags the whole outfit down and there's no fixing it. Merino is the one to pay for. It's thin enough to wear under a jacket, warm without bulk, and it doesn't hold smell the way cotton does. Lambswool is warmer and cheaper and slightly itchier. Acrylic pills within a season and then looks cheap forever.

The tee: thin jersey sags at the collar and shows every ripple underneath. Heavier cotton holds its shape through the wash and sits flat across the chest. The sleeve should end mid-bicep. Shorter looks like you're trying; longer looks like it's your brother's.

Navy, grey, white, black. Pick two.

Jeans and trousers

Dark denim with no fading, whiskering or distressing, in a straight leg. Untreated indigo does more work than any other trouser you own because it goes up and down. Wear it with the sweater and the leather shoes and it reads as smart casual. Wear it with the tee and sneakers on Saturday.

Then a pair of flat-front trousers, wool for cooler months or cotton twill in a mid-tan. These are what you wear when jeans would be a mistake and a suit would be overkill, which describes most of adult life.

Fit check for both: they should stay up without a belt. If they don't, the waist is wrong, and every other adjustment is decoration. At the bottom, aim for the hem just touching the top of your shoe with a slight fold, or grazing it with none. Anything pooling on your laces makes your legs look shorter.

The navy jacket

An unstructured navy blazer with minimal padding. Not a suit jacket orphaned from its trousers, which always looks like exactly that.

The shoulder seam has to land on your shoulder. This is the single measurement that decides whether the jacket is yours, because it's the one thing a tailor genuinely can't rebuild at sensible cost. Then: half an inch of shirt cuff showing below the jacket sleeve, the top button roughly at your navel, and the hem covering your seat.

Navy hides everything, works in every season, and is the reason you can show up to a wedding, a client meeting and a funeral out of the same wardrobe. Wool hopsack breathes and resists creasing. Avoid anything shiny.

Two outer layers

A chore coat or field jacket for most days, and a wool overcoat for cold ones and formal ones.

The chore coat should fit over the sweater without pulling across the back. Cotton canvas, four pockets, no logos. It gets better with wear, which is rare.

The overcoat needs to clear the blazer underneath. Size it wearing the jacket you'll actually wear beneath it, and check you can cross your arms in front of you. Length to the knee or just above. A wool and cashmere blend feels better than pure wool of the same weight, though pure wool wears harder.

What goes wrong: buying the overcoat in a shop, in a t-shirt, in July.

Two pairs of shoes

Dark brown leather shoes with a leather or rubber sole, and plain low-profile sneakers in white or off-white leather.

Dark brown works with navy, grey, tan and denim. Black works with black and with formal tailoring and not much else, which is why brown earns its place first. A derby or a plain-toe blucher is more versatile than an oxford because it goes down as well as up.

The sneakers should have no visible branding beyond something small, no chunky sole, no mesh. Leather wipes clean. That matters more than you'd think, because scuffed white sneakers undo an otherwise good outfit faster than anything else on this list.

Buy shoes late in the day when your feet have spread.

What a tailor can and can't fix

This is the part that makes cheap clothes look expensive.

Fixable, easily: trouser hems, trouser waist in or out an inch or two, tapering a wide leg, shortening shirt sleeves, taking in a shirt's side seams, shortening a jacket sleeve from the cuff.

Fixable, but it costs: jacket body slimmed through the sides, jacket sleeve shortened from the shoulder if the buttonholes are functional, coat length.

Not fixable: shoulders too wide. Jacket too short in the body. Trousers too tight through the seat. Anything too small.

So the rule when you're standing in the changing room is simple. Buy for the shoulders and the chest, and let someone else handle the rest.

A plain crewneck from a supermarket that fits your shoulders beats an expensive one that doesn't, every single time, and nobody looking at you will know or care which is which. Secondhand works on the same logic. A well-cut wool coat someone else wore for two winters is a better buy than a new one in a fabric that'll pill by February.

Ten pieces, properly fitted, quietly coloured. You'll get dressed in four minutes and spend no part of the day adjusting anything.

And the goal was never for someone to say they liked your jacket. It's that they don't remember what you wore at all, only that you looked like you'd handled it.