There are a lot of tailored jackets that don’t come as part of a suit, and if you’re like most men, you probably know them all by one catch-all: a blazer. But you shouldn’t, because half the time what you’re probably referring to is actually a sports jacket or ‘sports coat’, and your imprecision is making tailors sad. “These days the terms are becoming interchangeable and we’re in danger of losing their true origins,” says Simon Maloney, from Jermyn Street tailor New & Lingwood.

For all their similarities, a blazer and sports jacket are not the same, and you neither wear nor care for them in the same ways. “If you’re wearing a blazer, you would go to a restaurant and you would want the waiter to place it properly on a hanger,” says Jake Allen, founder of bespoke tailor King and Allen. “A sports jacket you could wear to a party, throw it on the back of the sofa and people could sit on it all night and it would still look good when you put it on to leave.” The difference basically being that sports jackets are tough and blazers are delicate, which is mostly down to the fabric; sports jackets tend to have plenty of texture and will often feature a patterned cloth, whereas blazers are constructed from finer fabrics more suited to formal occasions.

Hardiness is in the sports jacket’s DNA. The original iteration was the Norfolk jacket, a belted shooting coat built rugged enough to survive sideways rain on a grouse moor. “They’re typically made out of tweed, whereas blazers are often crafted out of lighter cloth,” says Campbell Carey, creative director of storied Savile Row tailor Huntsman. It’s a material that’s made to last – a sports jacket the house cut for the Earl of Cawdor in 1924 was recently brought back in for some new buttons, the rest of the jacket being as it left the shop 90-odd years ago.