The Best Hangers of 2023
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The Best Hangers of 2023

May 07, 2023

We’ve added Mawa's Space-Saving Hangers as an upgrade pick.

A good hanger will keep your closet tidy and your clothes neat and free of damage. After testing dozens of hangers over more than seven months with a range of clothing, we recommend Proman's Kascade Hanger as the best and most durable general-purpose hanger for most wardrobes. But we also recommend seven other hangers, depending on your space, wardrobe, and budget.

Lightweight and well constructed with a consistent finish, yet affordably priced.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $95.

Lightweight and slim with uniform construction, the Proman Kascade Hanger is an affordable, classic, and versatile clothing hanger style. Its consistently smooth edge finishing, hooks for chain-linking hangers vertically, and sturdy construction set it apart from competing models we tested. Our top all-purpose wooden hanger pick has range: It's strong enough to hold heavier winter coats and even suits while also accommodating pieces with delicate straps. If you buy a box, you’ll probably never have to worry about buying hangers again.

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Available in three styles, these hangers make a bit of a trade-off in durability and refinement.

If the Proman Kascade sells out, or if you want to buy a smaller quantity of hangers, we like The Container Store's Basic Natural Wood Hangers. In contrast with the one-size-fits-all design of the Proman hangers, these general-purpose wooden hangers come in different shapes to accommodate various clothing types. However, we found these hangers to be less durable and their hooks have a sharp tip that might snag some fabrics.

Available in shirt and suit styles, with add-ons to link hangers vertically or clips for skirts.

If you need slim hangers for a small closet, or if you own silk or gauze garments prone to slipping, we recommend the Joy Mangano Huggable Hangers. We found them more customizable and less likely to stretch or crease clothing than other slim hangers. Although they lack shoulder notches for holding strappy tops, the velvet flocking should keep most blouses and button-downs in place. They come in both shirt (no bottom bar) and suit styles, and you can buy additional packages of mini-hooks to cascade them vertically like the Proman hangers.

These PVC-coated steel hangers cost more than our top pick, but they’re elegant and available in a few forms and colors, and they’ll last for years.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $36.

Another good option if you have garments prone to slipping, Mawa's Space-Saving Hangers are slim, compact hangers with an elegant, continuous steel-rod design that will last for years. Their anti-slip PVC coating (available in several colors) keeps even the slinkiest clothes from falling to the floor. We like the variety of hanger styles, too, including the Euro, whose downturned-arc shape prevents shoulder denting in knit fabrics, the Silhouette, which has the more well-known shoulder-shaped profile (for jackets and blazers), a pant hanger, and a hanger for draping scarves, belts, or ties. The steel material, space efficiency, and long-term durability of these hangers make them a worthwhile investment.

A slim design with a coating that grips fabric but also allows pants to slide off the bar easily.

For pants and trousers, we like The Container Store Chrome Pant Hangers. The PVC nonslip coating holds pant fabric firmly, allowing for easy browsing through a closet, but it also permits pants to slide off without sticking, in contrast to rubber-coated models. The slim shape is space efficient but prone to causing slight creasing, unlike bigger and bulkier felt-bar designs.

A felt-covered pant bar keeps your trousers free of a crease, but this model is four times the price of our pants pick.

If you can spend considerably more, get the Kirby Allison's Hanger Project Luxury Wooden Felted Trouser Bar Hanger. This hanger style is pricey, but it uses premium materials and has an excellent finish, with a pant bar that both grips and prevents creases better than the rest. Available in two sizes and three wood finishes, this hanger is a luxurious splurge worthy of your special-occasion slacks and trousers.

A slim hanger with the most secure clips we tested.

Among the three skirt hangers we tested, the clips on the Mawa 12″ Skirt Clip Hanger felt the most secure, and each hanger took up slightly less physical space than the competition. An industry-leading 10-year warranty makes this skirt hanger stand out.

A graceful curve ending in a 2½-inch wide shoulder yoke will keep suits and coats in tip-top shape between wearings.

Some suits and coats deserve extra care, and the Kirby Allison's Hanger Project Luxury Wooden Jacket Hanger is designed for garment storage of expensive items whose shape you wouldn't entrust to a noncontoured wooden hanger. Its very wide shoulder yoke supports the heaviest garments without causing dimpling or creasing.

Lightweight and well constructed with a consistent finish, yet affordably priced.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $95.

Available in three styles, these hangers make a bit of a trade-off in durability and refinement.

Available in shirt and suit styles, with add-ons to link hangers vertically or clips for skirts.

These PVC-coated steel hangers cost more than our top pick, but they’re elegant and available in a few forms and colors, and they’ll last for years.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $36.

A slim design with a coating that grips fabric but also allows pants to slide off the bar easily.

A felt-covered pant bar keeps your trousers free of a crease, but this model is four times the price of our pants pick.

A slim hanger with the most secure clips we tested.

A graceful curve ending in a 2½-inch wide shoulder yoke will keep suits and coats in tip-top shape between wearings.

For this guide, we interviewed local professional organizer Elizabeth Zeigler of Bneato Bar (three consecutive years nominated as the Most Innovative Organizer at the Organizing Awards); Timothy Leung, a production pattern maker at rag & bone, who has more than 15 years of industry experience with woven outerwear, semitailored garments, and suiting; Sean Crowley, a senior designer at Ralph Lauren; and Kirby Allison, founder of The Hanger Project, who provided additional information about the specialty and luxury categories of clothing hangers.

We researched more than two dozen hangers sold through Amazon, The Container Store, Bed Bath & Beyond, and a range of specialty retailers, paying close attention to owner reviews. As a managing editor at Apartment Therapy for seven years, Gregory Han advised countless readers about storage and decluttering strategies. He also lived in a very cozy 1917 Los Angeles studio apartment, where he shared a single closet with his now-wife. Wirecutter's Alex Arpaia wrote about organizing small bathrooms and used her New York City apartment closet to test hangers for our closet organizing guide. In 2022, Katie Okamoto, also no stranger to small closets, updated this guide, reconsidering hangers that we had previously included in the Competition section, based on research and testing for our closet organizing guide.

The best hanger is designed to store and maintain garments without stretching, creasing, tearing, or changing the original shape of your clothing, which can help extend its life. Clothing hangers should be easy to hold, place, and sort while hanging, with a hook wide enough to fit securely over the closet rod (on average, modern closet rods are constructed to be from 1 inch to 1 5/16 inches in diameter; wooden rods in older homes may be smaller).

"[Most people] are perfectly well-served using a set of affordable wooden hangers." —Timothy Leung, fashion designer

Hangers come in a dizzying multitude of shapes, sizes, and garment-specific designs. After we separated our research into several categories—general use, pants, women's shirt, skirt, and suit/jacket/coat—we pinpointed the detailing that set apart the poor from the good from the excellent.

Professional organizer Elizabeth Zeigler recommends wooden hangers with metal hooks and strap notching.

Clothing designer Timothy Leung told us that hangers for shirts and lightweight jackets "should naturally follow and fit the lines of the shoulder seams to allow the garment to rest without slipping off." Most people, including Leung himself, "are perfectly well-served using a set of affordable wooden hangers," with just a few specialty hangers when required. As long as a hanger has no sharp edges or splintering, and the connection between the hook and body is secure, Leung said there's no need to overspend. Ralph Lauren senior designer Sean Crowley echoed this opinion: "It's swell if you can have a dozen hyper-specific hangers for specific garments, but it works just as well if you find a single hanger that can serve 99 percent of your wardrobe."

Lighter-weight clothing has a tendency to slip off or to stretch out at the shoulder ends or around the neck on poorly fit hangers, so professional organizer Elizabeth Zeigler recommends wooden hangers with metal hooks and strap notching, which are designed to last longer than their plastic equivalents. Hangers with swivel necks offer quicker access and easier organization in a small closet; tiered designs are common and further extend a closet's capacity but complicate access. We gave hangers with tiering hooks positive marks unless the feature interfered with the clothing.

A note about flocked hangers (the ones textured to feel like thin velvet): Such styles are generally very sharp and have a thin profile, which is fine for lightweight articles but not good for much else. Although the flocking is meant to help hold garments in place, it can easily wear off, leaving you with a cheap plastic hanger. (Although, we haven't experienced this while long-term testing our favorite flocked hanger.) Flocking is good on hanger pant bars, but in our testing we always checked to see if it rubbed off easily; even between hangers of the same brand, flocking quality could vary.

If you care about reducing creases in your best pants, skirts, and suits, consider investing in clothing-specific hangers. Here are the factors we considered according to hanger type.

Pants: Hangers made for pants often have open-end, slide-in/slide-out designs. Typically the bar has a covering of nonslip material that is grippy without being sticky; foam, rubber, gel, plastic, and felt are common coatings. Some hangers are equipped with locking pant bars, a two-piece mechanism of a lateral wooden rod secured at one end with bent metal to hold trousers in place. This hanger style can leave conspicuous creasing across the thigh, and the pressure of the locked bar may damage the fabric of soft premium wool trousers over time, so we avoided this design. We also evaluated pant hangers for balance—some models teeter one way or the other a little more noticeably when pants are hanging on them, so we looked for a model that wouldn't tilt.

Skirts: Hangers designed for skirts often consist of just a single metal rod with two adjustable metal clamps attached across each end for holding a skirt at the waistline. If the clamps are insufficiently padded with rubber, they can crease or damage fabrics when you remove them.

Suits and coats: Hanging suits and coats carefully can extend their wear. Some men's suit hangers are built significantly wider for optimal support across the coat shoulders, contoured with wide flares mimicking the human body to maintain shape between wears. Even an affordable off-the-rack suit can benefit from the contouring and support of a suit hanger, though you’d have to weigh the investment of a specialty hanger against that of the suit itself. Hanger designer Kirby Allison told us that suit and coat hangers should "extend all the way to—but not beyond—the point where the shoulder meets the sleeve," measured directly across the back (the point-to-point measurement), following a gentle curve in semblance to the shoulder.

We looked at more than 30 different hangers sourced from big-box retailers, Amazon, and specialty online retailers, eventually calling in 14 of the highest-rated models for seven months of hands-on testing. We used an enclosed closet and a freestanding Fol-D-Rak clothing rack to test the hangers with cotton, wool, denim, and nylon garments, including collared shirts, trousers, jeans, coats, suits, dresses, and blouses; we used the hangers daily and normally, looking for evidence of creasing or stretching after storage periods of one to two weeks with shirts and trousers.

We pulled pant bars and hooks with both reasonable and unreasonable force to inspect for sturdiness, and we carefully inspected each hanger by touch along the top, bottom, and sides for sharp edges, exposed screws or nails, and any jagged wooden joinery. We also evaluated how easy or difficult it was to put each hanger onto a closet rod or to remove it. We tested clamp mechanisms on fabric and on the meatiest part of our palms to determine how much force each clamp applied, and we carefully inspected each hanger for sharp edges along the ends of each rod and hook, as lightweight skirt material is prone to snags.

We eliminated clamp-style trouser hangers because they tend to damage fabric. Tier hangers provide efficient storage, but we omitted this style because the narrow metal gauge tubing creases fabric, and in practice it was too easy to accidentally slide off items on other tiers. All of our picks except our coat-hanger recommendation offer slim designs to maximize closet space.

Lightweight and well constructed with a consistent finish, yet affordably priced.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $95.

After testing a finalist selection of six general-purpose hangers, we determined that our favorite is the Proman Kascade Hanger, a versatile model with features such as a loop for space-saving cascading hanging, a uniform durable construction, a smooth finish where wood may meet fabric, and a ball-end hook to prevent snagging. With bonuses like shoulder notches for slim-strapped tops and loops for tiered hanging, as well as a slightly lower price per hanger, this hanger style bests our previous pick, The Container Store's wooden hangers.

The first thing you’ll notice while handling a Kascade is how lightweight and satisfyingly smooth the hanger feels to the touch. Each one has buffed edges, a ball-finished hook, and a pant bar finished with a slightly grippier material compared with what's on the shoulders. At 17 inches wide, this hanger is the perfect size for medium-size button-up long-sleeve shirts. It aligns perfectly with the seams across the shoulders and around the sleeves, and it's wide enough across the shoulders to prevent visible creasing on a two-ply 120-thread-count cotton dress shirt. During normal use in our tests, the Kascade hangers provided easy and comfortable access without ever getting in the way, even under the weight of a heavier peacoat.

As for the pant bar, in comparison with our runner-up from The Container Store and other wooden hangers, the Kascade pant bar exhibited less flexing when we pulled on it.

Our one major complaint about the Proman Kascade Hanger is that it's available only in bulk lots of 50 hangers at a time (a bit under a dollar each). Households of one or two people without a lot of storage might be better served by our alternate pick from The Container Store.

We’d also prefer to see the Proman Kascade offered in additional, alternative designs similar to The Container Store's Basic Natural Wood Hangers line. A felt or textured pant bar would be a welcome addition, and the Kascade design's standard but slim shoulder bars are probably not appropriate for long-term use with finer formal coats.

Available in three styles, these hangers make a bit of a trade-off in durability and refinement.

If the Proman style sells out, or if you’re not ready to commit to buying a pack of 50, The Container Store Basic Natural Wood Hangers are nearly as durable and almost as refined. Unlike our Proman pick, these come in three variations: basic, barless shirt hangers; shirt hangers with bars, suitable for hanging pants; and blouse hangers with notches for thin straps plus ribbed plastic to prevent shirts from sliding off. The assorted designs make these hangers a better choice if you want to mix-and-match complementary hangers (especially in a closet that a couple shares). On top of that, you can purchase them in smaller lots of six, which comes out to a very reasonable $1.33 per hanger as of this writing.

The Container Store's hangers also include nonslip toothed inserts to keep blouses in place, a welcome detail for lightweight garments with straps or sleeves prone to sliding off wooden hangers.

These hangers do have fewer features than the Proman Kascade. The pant bar and garment notches are either/or options across the three versions, so you can't use them interchangeably among different types of clothing. The hooks have a sharp tip, unlike the Proman style's ball end. And the pant hanger didn't break when we pulled across the pant bar, but our pulling did expose a gap at the joint that could pinch a garment (though this isn't a problem with the barless shirt hanger).

Available in shirt and suit styles, with add-ons to link hangers vertically or clips for skirts.

The experts we spoke with for our closet organizing guide all agree that slim hangers are the best way to maximize space in any closet. The Joy Mangano Huggable Hangers ranked among the most customizable hangers we tried. Any slim hanger can crease or stretch clothing, but the shaping of the Mangano shirt hangers minimizes these issues. Unlike the Proman hangers, the Mangano hangers lack a loop for cascading hangers, but you can buy a set of mini-hooks for similar functionality. The velvety texture on some flocked hangers can wear off after time, but we haven't had a problem with these hangers after four months of long-term testing.

These hangers have received some of the best customer reviews we’ve seen, with an average of 4.8 stars (out of five) across just over 600 reviews on The Container Store's site when we first published this guide. Many reviewers attach before-and-after photos showing their space savings from using the Joy Mangano hangers, and many people like how great these hangers’ flocking is at preventing clothing from slipping off. (The Container Store no longer carries this hanger, though it sells a very similar one from its own brand.)

These PVC-coated steel hangers cost more than our top pick, but they’re elegant and available in a few forms and colors, and they’ll last for years.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $36.

Like the Joy Mangano Huggable Hangers, the Mawa Space-Saving Hangers are slim, so they maximize space in any closet, as we note in our closet organizing guide. These steel hangers with a nonslip PVC coating (available in several colors) have a simple, continuous steel-rod design that will last for years. They’re also available in a variety of styles, including the Euro, whose downturned-arc shape prevents shoulder denting in knit fabrics, the Silhouette, which has the more well-known shoulder-shaped profile, a pant hanger, and a hanger for draping scraves, belts, or ties. The standard Euro style comes to about $35 for a set of 10 or a bit less than $3.50 per hanger—compared with about 90¢ per hanger for the Joy Mangano slim hangers. But the steel material, sleek design, and long-term durability of the Mawa hangers make them a worthwhile investment, if you can afford it.

In an earlier version of this guide, we dismissed a couple of similar, slim, PVC-coated steel hangers from Mawa in the Competition section. But we have since reevaluated them. Our tester has been using the Euro and pants hangers, in white, for more than three years and has seen no sign of wear or issues with dust collection; our tester has also never observed any sticky residue from the coating or unusual amounts of creasing.

A slim design with a coating that grips fabric but also allows pants to slide off the bar easily.

After testing nine other pant hangers with nearly every weight and fabric in our wardrobe, we concluded that the best type of pant and trouser hanger for most people is a slim open-ended metal design. Our favorites in the category are The Container Store Chrome Pant Hangers. The PVC nonslip coating has just the right amount of grip to hold a variety of fabrics—denim, cotton, or wool—securely in place even without the end hook that some other models have on their open bars. Among all the open-ended pant hangers we saw, The Container Store's hanger also did not angle forward or backward when we placed pants on its arm, evidence of a well-balanced design that prevents pants from sliding and fabric from bunching. In our daily use pants easily came off without "sticking," in contrast to our experience with competing rubber-coated models. And the slim shape allows for more space efficiency in closets.

In our tests, all narrow-bar pant hangers, including The Container Store Chrome Pant Hangers, eventually left a crease on lightweight-fabric cotton trousers within three to five days (although not as bad as from clip-style pant hangers). The appearance of creasing varied depending on the humidity and the diameter of the pant arms, but we needed a light steam or ironing to remove marks indented onto our lightweight suit pants.

A felt-covered pant bar keeps your trousers free of a crease, but this model is four times the price of our pants pick.

If price isn't a concern for you, we can easily recommend the Kirby Allison's Hanger Project Luxury Wooden Felted Trouser Bar Hanger, sold in sets of five. This is a closed-bar design, but the anticrease felt-covered pant bar is worth the investment. The hanger is available in two sizes and three wood finishes, with felt that feels luxurious yet never shed any fuzz on pants or skin in our tests. More important, the bar never noticeably creased our pants. Hangers like this one are a splurge worthy of your special-occasion slacks and trousers.

A slim hanger with the most secure clips we tested.

After careful inspection and repeated use, we decided that we liked the Mawa 12″ Skirt Clip Hanger best for its narrow no-slide clips, its 10-year warranty, and its current price of about $3 per hanger. (We also recommend Mawa's Space-Saving Hangers.) In contrast to pant hangers, a clamp-style design is preferable for hanging skirts since you can attach the clamps at the article's reinforced waistline. As long as enough protective material exists between the clamp mechanism and the fabric, ripping or tearing is unlikely, and Mawa's clips feel secure while also taking up slightly less physical space than the competition.

Models from Pro-Mart and Whitmor are nearly identical to Mawa's skirt hanger in both looks and operation, offering the same style of metal and the same rubber-coated clip mechanism. We think the Pro-Mart and Whitmor skirt hangers are perfectly serviceable alternatives for tiered use, though they don't have Mawa's decade-long warranty coverage.

As good as the Mawa skirt hanger is, it could be a little easier to access in closets if it were equipped with a swiveling hook. (Neither the Pro-Mart nor Whitmor models offers that feature either.) Some people may also miss a tier hook for attaching additional hangers vertically to optimize space, but its absence means there's no issue of a hook pressing outward and against clothing, a bothersome problem we noted while testing both the Pro-Mart and Whitmor skirt hangers.

A graceful curve ending in a 2½-inch wide shoulder yoke will keep suits and coats in tip-top shape between wearings.

The Kirby Allison's Hanger Project Luxury Wooden Suit Hanger hits the highest mark in construction, materials, and detailing, making it our favorite suit hanger.

The hanger's large, 2½-inch-width shoulder flares, paired with the same high-quality felt that covers the Kirby Allison trouser hangers, are in a league of their own. Ironically, this hanger's strength is the source of its sole major drawback (beyond the significant $30 investment per hanger): It's big and heavy, requiring approximately the same space on our closet rod as five Proman Kascade hangers aligned side by side! Still, considering the price of any decently tailored suit, the increase in size and price seems well warranted if it means protecting formal attire from collapsed shoulders and creasing.

Other suit hangers we tried, such as the Butler Luxury suit hanger and the Wooden Hangers USA design, offered similar wider shoulder flaring to emulate the male human shoulder and maintain garment form, but the Kirby Allison hanger was the most accurately rounded; it's also free of the excess glue or rough joinery that mars cheaper models.

The Kirby Allison's Hanger Project Luxury Wooden Suit Hanger is a splurge investment, considerably more expensive than the competition. So why pick this one over our all-purpose choice? We believe that the finest tailored clothing, such as suits and coats, deserves a long-term investment and particular care, and that a purchase of this hanger would be the exception, not the rule.

Surprisingly, Kirby Allison's Hanger Project does not offer any sort of formal warranty coverage. (The website stipulates, "We stand by our products 100% and will do whatever it takes to correct for damaged hangers. However we do reserve the right to not send out replacements.") It does have a 30-day return policy in case the hangers don't meet a customer's sizing expectations, but at this price we’d expect a better guarantee.

General-purpose hangers

IKEA Bumerang: People often name this hanger as a cheap general-use favorite, and it gets the job done with a minimalist frame. One of our testers has been using these hangers (in white) since late 2017, using them for everything from winter coats to blazers to silk shirts, with neither issue nor complaint. But in comparison with our top pick in the general-use category, price reflects quality: In our tests, a rough wooden finish, inconsistent construction, and a weakly secured pant bar were characteristic.

Kirby Allison's The Hanger Project Profile B Women's Dress Hanger: This very expensive hanger is designed with a smaller shoulder width and a sharper arm angle in accordance with what's commonly marketed as "women's" sizing. The 1.15-inch shoulder flare is gently flocked at the ends. Garment notches also covered in felt flocking prevent slipping, making this model the best women's fine-garment hanger for blouses and shirts where delicate fabrics deserve extra care. Additional clips for skirts with ribbed rubber clamps secure at the waistline. At roughly $20 each, the Profile B is out of most people's budget, but it's a good option for delicate garments and petite sizing.

Slim hangers

AmazonBasics Velvet Suit Hangers: Although these hangers are affordable and come in three color choices and packs of either 30, 50, or 100, the abundance of negative reviews they receive is troubling. Many reviewers complain of the AmazonBasics velvet hangers arriving broken or breaking shortly after arrival. Others mention that the flocking rubs off easily, or that the coating has damaged clothes people were trying to hang-dry.

Tosnail Super Grippy Slip-Reducing Contour Shirt Hangers: The Tosnails look like a knockoff of the Mawa hangers. We were ultimately concerned that their shape could lead clothing to slip, and the rubber coating would be too sticky. Some reviewers complained about the same coating issues we were concerned with, and others call out the Tosnails for being too large for small tops.

Pant hangers

Storage Dynamics Pant Organizer Slac Hangers (previously called IdeaWorks Slacks Hangers): The rotating smooth-ribbed plastic cover across each of these chrome-plated open-end pant hangers made it easy for us to remove pants individually, but the design also made it easy for pants to fall off while we thumbed through the closet.

J.S. Hanger Slacks Pant Hangers: The biggest drawback of this model is the particularly tacky and sticky rubber coating applied across the pant bar. In our testing it was a dust magnet that transferred particles onto darker fabrics, and in use it required us to remove the hanger from the rod to get to our pants, defeating the convenience of an open-end design.

Richards Homewares Open End Trouser Hangers: This style looks similar to the Closet Complete pant hanger, but the hook element seems to be off balance, as it required us to push heavier-fabric pants to the rear of the arm to counteract tilting.

Kirby Allison's Hanger Project Luxury Wooden Clamping Trouser Hanger: In our testing, this model was the only clamp-style pant hanger we tried. We liked the felt-lined trouser grip, which is designed for storing pants upside down from the cuff. We think this style is a worthy premium alternative for your finer dress slacks, as it can reduce or perhaps even eliminate the formation of wrinkles between wears.

Butler Luxury Trouser Hanger: The reinforced and solid construction of this round velvet-covered bar pant hanger is nice, but it's almost double the normal width. At about $8 apiece currently, it's a fairly priced luxury alternative to the Kirby Allison trouser hanger, with a slightly less fine felt and an opening between body and bar that is an inch narrower.

Skirt hangers

Whitmor Ebony Chrome Add-On Skirt/Slack Hanger: This skirt hanger is nearly identical in design to the Pro-Mart DAZZ model, though it sports a slightly larger dimple on the clamp, a slightly wider tier hook, and a rubber-coated tip on the top hook. It has the same tier-hook protrusion issue we noted with the Pro-Mart DAZZ, with a slightly wider hook.

Suit and coat hangers

Butler Luxury Tailor Made Suit Hanger: Available in two widths—a regular 16½-inch hanger for suit sizes 38 to 42, and an extra-large 18-inch model for suit sizes 43 to 48—this premium model ranked just behind our top suit-hanger pick, with noticeably less rounded and less smoothly finished ends in comparison with the Kirby Allison's Hanger Project design. This hanger is big and bulky, and only a few would fit in our closet.

Container Store Superior Natural Wooden Coat and Suit Hangers: Both the coat and suit version are available in only 18-inch models for suit sizes 43 to 48. We dismissed it because of its inflexibility in sizing, but if 43 to 48 is your size, and you need a more budget-friendly suit hanger, this would be a good option.

Wooden Hangers USA 18″ Ultimate Wide Suit Hanger: This model is designed for larger-size suits, but our test sample's pant bar exhibited undesirable visible gaps and edges. At just $7 apiece currently, this hanger represents a modest upgrade from the molded-plastic hangers that come with off-the-rack suits.

This article was edited by Daniela Gorny and Christine Ryan.

Elizabeth Zeigler, Professional organizer, Interview

Timothy Leung, production pattern maker at rag & bone, Interview

Sean Crowley, Ralph Lauren senior designer, Interview

Kirby Allison, Founder of Kirby Allison's Hanger Project, Interview

Gregory Han

Gregory Han is a design, travel, and lifestyle writer, and the co-author of Creative Spaces: People, Homes, and Studios to Inspire. His work can be found at Design Milk, Dwell, Domino, Apartment Therapy, and Airbnb.

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