Ask what a suit is made of and you'll be told a fiber — wool, or a wool blend, or 'Super 130s.' None of those answers tells you whether the suit will survive a Tampa summer. The number that does is the weight, in grams per meter, and almost nobody selling suits in Florida volunteers it. Ask for it anyway. It is the single most useful number on the cloth card.
What the number means
Cloth weight is simply how much a meter of the fabric weighs. The world's suiting runs from about 190 grams (gossamer summer cloths) to 400-plus (winter flannels and tweeds). The default business suiting of the northern world sits around 280 to 320 grams, woven tightly for drape, warmth and a hard press. That default is what fills most racks in Florida, because the racks are stocked by national buyers who live somewhere with a winter.
Why weight alone will mislead you
Here is the trap: weight measures cloth, not airflow. A 250-gram cloth woven open — a fresco, a hopsack, a high-twist plain weave — passes air freely and wears cool. A 220-gram cloth woven dense passes nothing and wears like cling film. Cooling comes from ventilation, and ventilation comes from the weave. So the honest formulation is: weight tells you what to shortlist, weave tells you what to buy.
- Under 220g: light, fragile, wrinkle-prone. Occasional-wear cloth, not a working suit.
- 230–260g, open weave: the Florida sweet spot. High-twist worsteds live here — cool, crease-resistant, year-round.
- 260–290g, basket weave: fresco and hopsack. Paradoxically the coolest wools made, and the most durable on this list.
- 300g and up, closed weave: beautiful cloth for Chicago. In Tampa, reserved for January and air-conditioned lives.
What about Super numbers?
Super 120s, 150s, 180s — these measure fiber fineness, not quality and not coolness. Finer fiber means softer hand and higher price, but also less resilience: a Super 180s cloth wrinkles if you look at it firmly and wears through years sooner. For a Florida working suit, a sturdy Super 100s-to-120s high-twist beats a delicate 160s in every way that shows up after week one. The Super number is a luxury metric. The gram number is a survival metric. Buy on the second, indulge on the first.
The question to ask
So, standing in front of anyone selling you a suit in this state, the script is short: 'What does this weigh, and is the weave open or closed?' If the answer is a Super number, a brand story, or a blank look, you have learned what you needed to. A tailor who chooses cloth for this climate leads with the answer — usually with the swatch held up to the light so you can see the air path yourself.
The full guide to cloth for Florida heat — weights, weaves, mills, and what to avoid — lives on the cloth page.
The Arbiter cloth guide