The best garment bags for travel

Answer honestly: is the garment structured, and does it have to look pressed on arrival?

• A structured suit jacket for a meeting or a wedding. Yes, use a garment bag. The shoulder is what folding ruins and nothing else protects it.
• Shirts. No. A garment folder inside your normal carry-on does this better and lighter.
• An unstructured blazer. A folder is fine. Unstructured jackets recover from a soft fold overnight.
• A long formal dress. Yes, and a breathable one specifically.
• Casual clothes. No. This is a product for tailoring.

Most airlines count a garment bag as your carry-on, subject to the same dimensional limits - which for a folded convertible bag means checking the folded measurements against your airline's published limit. A full-length bag carried flat is a different proposition and depends on the aircraft.

Some full-service carriers will hang a garment bag in a forward closet on request, particularly in premium cabins, but this is a courtesy rather than an entitlement and closets fill quickly. Ask at boarding, and have a plan if the answer is no - that plan is usually laying it flat on top of the bags in the overhead bin, which works better than it sounds.

1. Turn the jacket half inside out. Fold one shoulder into the other, which protects the outer fabric and keeps the shoulder structure supported.
2. Put tissue or a dry-cleaning bag between layers. Slippery plastic lets fabric move instead of creasing against itself - this genuinely works and costs nothing.
3. Fold trousers along the existing crease, never against it.
4. Pack it on top, with nothing on it. Pressure is what sets a crease.
5. Hang it immediately on arrival, in the bathroom while you shower if it needs help. Twenty minutes of steam does what an iron would.

How to pack a suit in a carry-on walks through the same fold step by step, including where in the bag it goes and what to do about shirts, shoes and the tie. If the trip is for work, best carry-on luggage for business travel covers the bag it all goes into.

How much the garment gets folded, since that is the entire function. Then whether you need a second bag, which is the main practical cost of a dedicated garment bag. Then whether the folded size clears a carry-on limit, because a garment bag that has to be checked defeats the purpose - a checked suit arrives at the carousel however well it was packed.

We do not run a testing lab and have not flown suits in these ourselves; see our methodology.

• Sealed plastic garment bags. Fabric needs airflow over several days, and a sealed bag traps moisture against wool.
• Garment bags with no shoulder support. The shoulder is the part of a jacket that folding ruins, so a bag that does not support it is not doing the job.
• Rolling garment bags at checked-bag size. A checked suit arrives at a carousel, which is the outcome the product exists to avoid.
• Anything that folds the suit more than once. Each fold is a crease, and two folds is worse than a good garment folder.

Tailoring has a different failure mode from the rest of a wardrobe, and the number that predicts it is the fold count. Best carry-on luggage for suits ranks the carry-on options on how many folds each one puts in the jacket.

A suit takes one fold and recovers; a floor-length dress in chiffon or satin does not. Best garment bags for dresses covers the full-length and untapered options, and why dry-cleaner plastic is the wrong thing to travel in.

Plenty of trips do not justify a garment bag, and a shirt packed properly in a suitcase arrives acceptably. How to pack a suitcase without wrinkles covers the fold count and the padding trick that does most of the work.

A garment folder keeps the folds you made; it cannot remove the ones the trip adds. If you travel in shirts, the pairing that works is a folder plus a small dual-voltage steamer - the best travel steamers ranks them on voltage, tank size and whether they can actually press a collar.