Functional buttonholes on the sleeve — each one cut open and hand-stitched so the cuff truly unbuttons. The detail you cannot fake, and the reason a bespoke sleeve is altered from the shoulder, never the hem.
Working Button
Functional
Worn Undone
The surgeon’s cuff — sleeve buttons that actually fasten — is one of tailoring’s most quietly debated details. Two legends claim its origin. One says Napoleon ordered buttons sewn onto his soldiers’ cuffs to stop them wiping their faces on their sleeves. The other says military field surgeons unbuttoned and rolled back their cuffs to work — hence the name.
Both stories are almost certainly apocryphal. What is true is simpler: a working cuff announces that the buttonholes are real, cut and sewn by hand, and that the sleeve was finished only after its length was set on the body. It is proof of bespoke, written in four small buttons.
At Sakal, every jacket sleeve is finished with true working buttonholes — never decoration.
The Sleeve Comes Last
Sleeve length is confirmed on the body before anything else. Only then are the buttonholes marked — because once they are cut, the sleeve can no longer be shortened from the hem.
Cut by Hand
Each buttonhole is opened by hand along the cuff. Four to a sleeve, spaced and angled by eye rather than by template.
Stitched in Silk
Every hole is bar-tacked and wrapped in fine silk thread by hand — the same discipline as the lapel buttonhole, repeated across both cuffs of a single jacket.
Kissing Buttons
The buttons are set close enough to overlap slightly — ‘kissing’ — and the lowest is often left undone. A small, deliberate sign that the cuff is real.
The working cuff is judged in the details that surround it — the buttons chosen, how closely they sit, the thread that frames each hole. Nothing here is incidental.
Worn open at the last button, the cuff becomes a quiet signal among those who know to look for it.
Natural materials — never plastic — with real depth and irregular grain.
Set to overlap slightly, the classic mark of a hand-finished cuff.
Each buttonhole wrapped by hand to match, or quietly contrast, the cloth.
Once the holes are cut, sleeve length can only be adjusted at the shoulder.
FAUX CUFF
SURGEON CUFF · ŠAKAL
ŠAKAL ATELIER | SINGAPORE
Bespoke
FORMAL
2 & 3-Piece Suits
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CASUAL TAILORING
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