How to Travel With a Suit

Some trips let you dress down. A wedding two states over, a pitch you flew in for, an interview the next morning: those don't. The suit has to come out of the bag looking like it didn't spend six hours crushed under a laptop, and you find out whether it did about an hour before you need it.

So you're standing over a suit, figuring out how to get it there in one piece. You have three options:

• Pack it in a bag that keeps it on a hanger. The best result of the three.
• Fold it into your case. Workable for a night or two, if you fold it properly.
• Wear it while you travel. Fine on a short flight, if you don't mind spending the trip in it.

Whichever you choose, don't put the suit in a checked bag. It travels in a bag you carry onto the plane.

The reason is what happens in the cargo hold. Airline handlers mishandle roughly 20 bags for every 1,000 passengers, and nearly half of that happens during transfers, according to industry body SITA.

The odds aren't high. But a suit you keep with you can't be one of the bags that goes missing, and it can't be delayed or left going around on a carousel while you stand there in what you flew in. So with that decided, the real work is packing it well.

What's the best way to pack a suit for a trip?

For a business trip where you're carrying your own bag, the best answer is a garment duffel: a weekender-sized bag with a garment carrier built into the lining.

The suit hangs inside on a hanger and curves gently around the shape of the bag, so it arrives without a hard crease in it. And it's still only one bag to carry.

That's the idea behind our own garment duffel, the Grand. The garment carrier is sewn into the lining, the jacket and trousers hang on a clip-in hanger, and as you zip the bag shut the suit curves around a wide, gentle bend instead of folding.

It hangs the suit flat, the way a full-length garment bag does, but folds down to the size of an overnight bag. So you're not choosing between a crease-free suit and packing light.

Interested in a garment duffel? See our collection here.

The other ways all work, but each one gives something up:

• Folding it into your case. Fine for a single night with a soft, unstructured suit, but a structured suit creases along the fold, and that crease won't drop out before your meeting.
• A full-length garment bag. Keeps the suit flattest of anything, but at full length it's too long for the roughly 22 in (56 cm) most overhead bins allow. So it gets checked, or you pay for it as a second carry-on and end up juggling two bags through the airport.
• Wearing it. Works for a short flight, but only if you're happy to spend the trip in the suit itself.

Whichever bag you hang it in, use a wide, contoured hanger. A thin wire one lets the shoulders droop and dents the shoulder line you'll be looking at all day.

If you want to compare a few garment duffels before deciding, we line them up here.

Why does a suit crease when you travel?

A suit creases when the cloth gets bent hard and held there, usually under the weight of whatever else is in the bag. Whether that crease drops out or stays comes down to how far the fiber bent.

Wool fibers behave like tiny coiled springs. Bend one a little and it returns to shape on its own. Bend it past a point, under warmth and pressure, and it takes a set that stays.

A gentle curve keeps the fiber inside that springy range, so the wrinkle falls out when you hang the suit up. A hard fold under a packed case pushes past that point and leaves a line that steaming barely lifts.

That's the whole reason a garment duffel works: it curves the suit instead of folding it.

So check what the suit is actually made of, because the cloth does part of the work too. Pure worsted wool recovers best: those coiled fibers spring back.

A wool-and-synthetic blend resists wrinkling in the first place, which is why it gets sold as a travel fabric. But it recovers worse once a hard crease sets, so pack one badly and the crease-resistant suit can end up looking rougher than plain wool would have.

How to fold a suit into a case without creasing it

If you'd rather not carry a separate bag, you can fold a suit into an ordinary case. It's the fallback rather than the best way, since it won't come out as crisp as it would from a garment duffel, but packed carefully it holds up well enough for most trips.

The trick is one soft fold instead of the four or five hard ones you get from cramming it in, using the inside-out shoulder fold:

1. Turn one shoulder of the jacket inside out.
2. Slip the other shoulder inside it, so the two padded shoulders protect each other, with the good side of the cloth facing in.
3. Fold the jacket once from there, over something soft (a rolled shirt, or a rolled pair of trousers laid in the crook of the fold), so the cloth bends around a curve instead of over a hard edge.
4. Let the fold land at or just above the waist button, where a jacket already bends most easily.

For the trousers, fold along the crease that's already pressed into them, and keep any new fold off the leg.

Lay them into the case first with the legs hanging out over the side, pack the folded jacket and the rest on top, then fold the trouser legs back over everything so they end up on top instead of creased underneath.

Don't roll a structured jacket. Rolling works for soft knitwear and unstructured summer jackets, but a jacket with a canvas chest and padded shoulders won't roll cleanly and comes out misshapen.

And pack the folded suit last, on top, where nothing heavy sits on it. There's a fuller walk-through of the fold here.

How to pack everything else without crushing the suit

However you're carrying the suit, pack everything else around it so nothing presses in. Heavy and hard things at the bottom, the suit on top, always.

• Shoes are the main threat. Put them in shoe bags or stuff them with socks, then lay them along the base of the case, soles down, away from the cloth, so a heel can't leave a mark and no polish rubs off onto the suit.
• Toiletry bag and anything rigid go at the base too, beside the shoes and clear of the jacket.
• Shirts double as padding. Fold or roll them and tuck them into the crook of the jacket's fold, where they cushion the one bend you care about.
• The suit goes in last, and nothing goes on top of it.

You can fold a jacket perfectly and still crease it at this step. The fold was fine at the hotel; the problem was the pair of shoes that sat on the lapel for four hours somewhere over the Atlantic.

How to get your suit ready to wear once you land

Hang the suit up the moment you reach the room, on a wide hanger, and give it two or three hours. Most travel creases drop out on their own as the fibers relax back into shape.

For the creases that don't drop out, steam the suit rather than iron it

Steam relaxes the fibers without touching the surface. A hot dry iron laid straight onto wool flattens the raised nap and leaves a shine you can't lift back out. Set it too hot and it scorches.

For a light crease, on an ordinary night. Hang the suit near a running hot shower with the door shut for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Before a big event, with a structured suit. Hanging a tailored jacket in heavy bathroom steam the night before is a gamble. Repeated steam can soften the canvas that gives the jacket its shape, and it has to firm back up by morning.

When the crease has to come out, use a handheld travel steamer rather than a fogged-up bathroom, so you control where the steam goes. Keep it moving, work top to bottom, and hold it a couple of inches (about 5 cm) off the cloth.

If you're down to an iron. Put a damp cloth between it and the suit, keep it on the wool setting and press lightly, with the iron always moving.

How to choose a suit and bag that travel well

If you're flying with a suit often, look at the wool and the hardware: a wool that springs back, and a bag whose zipper and handle are as solid as its leather.

On the suit, the fabric matters more than the pattern. A worsted or high-twist wool recovers best from a day folded in a bag, and a soft, half-canvas jacket folds without showing the fold afterward, while a stiff, fully canvassed formal suit will crease.

On the bag, the zipper and the handle give out before the leather does when you use it every week. They get the most use, so they need to still work smoothly years later.

The bag itself should either hold the suit at full length, or curve it gently into something that fits the overhead bin.

If that's what you're after, you can see our suit carriers here. And for a shorter trip, where the bag has to do double duty, we walk through how to pick one here.

Traveling with a suit: common questions

Does a garment bag count as your carry-on?

On most airlines, yes. A garment bag or duffel counts as your one carry-on rather than an extra item, as long as it's within the size limit.

That's part of the appeal of a garment duffel: the suit travels inside your one carry-on, so you're not paying for or juggling a second bag.

On strict carriers, watch the weight limit too, often around 15-22 lb (7-10 kg), so check yours before you fly. (We cover which airlines count it as a personal item here.)

Can you ever check a suit?

Only if you truly have to, and only in a hard case that won't get crushed. A checked bag gets stacked, dropped and left sitting, and all three of those crease a suit packed near the top of a soft one.

And if a full overhead bin forces a gate-check on you, a hanging garment bag or duffel still protects the suit better than a packed case would: it travels on its own, with nothing else's weight on top.

Does a long-haul or international trip change anything?

Not really. The same advice just matters more. The longer the suit sits in the bag, the more it pays to carry it gently, so lean toward hanging it, and hang it up the minute you land rather than the hour before you dress.

The three things to get right

1. Don't check the suit. Carry it onto the plane.
2. Keep the bend gentle, whichever way you carry it.
3. Hang it up the minute you arrive.

Get those three right and the suit looks like it traveled the whole way on a hanger, even when you folded it into a case at 6 a.m.