About a year back, I made the rather poor decision to purchase two custom-made suits. Actually, in most senses, the decision was quite a good one. Those two bespoke suits have since become my favorites, drawing frequent compliments and holding up better than any other suits I’ve owned. The problem, however, is that I’m now ruined for life; I’ll never be able to go back to buying suits off the rack.

In fact, I can no longer even really appreciate my other, previously seemingly fine, suits. While I’d love to toss them all and start again from scratch, the dictates of cost prevent me. Instead, I’ve simply been going through and upgrading those older suits slightly, adding to them the most important mark of hand workmanship: working sleeve buttons.

Sleeve buttons? I hear you ask. But it’s true. Ask any student of the sartorial and you’re likely to hear him wax on thusly (this particular waxing being taken from Tom Wolfe’s The Secret Vice):

Real buttonholes. That’s it! A man can take his thumb and forefinger and unbutton his sleeve at the wrist because this kind of suit has real buttonholes there. Tom, boy, it’s terrible. Once you know about it, you start seeing it. All the time! There are just two classes of men in the world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or – yes! – men who can unbutton the sleeve at the wrist because they have real buttonholes and the sleeve really buttons up.

Strangely enough, though, adding that key touch isn’t at all a pricey endeavor. For less than fifty bucks a suit, your local tailor can operationalize your buttons, giving you a look that says “purchase Armani? How terribly plebeian!”

Now if only there were some similar sub-$100 trick to bump my one-bedroom apartment onto par with the Trump Tower’s penthouse suite.