What is HAND MADE?

[Costi]

NJS, what Soviet producs were really known for (whether bicycles, vacuum cleaners or gabardine cloth) was their resilience and durability. They were unbreakable. I think it was you who once wrote the story of the head cutter of a tailoring shop (I don't recall the names) who would say: "Sir, our suits may not fit, but they last forever" I guess this IS a form of exellence
Interesting about the Utopia experiment. I wonder how long it lasted and why it stopped...

[Costi]

There are plenty of Capitlalist who went bankrupt trying to make the best products.

Greger, you wrote a great truth here. I think this is one of the greatest dangers threatening the small world of bespoke tailoring today. It is not enough to make good quality products, you need some form of marketing or else you die. Of course, it needn't be the cheap, agressive, brainwashing marketing strategies many large companies seem to promote (and, unfortunately, it works!), but you need to be connected in some way to the community to which you catter. Building a reputation and clientelle is difficult and takes a lot of time, and maintaining it is sometimes not easy, either.
Actually, NJS, I think a large fashion house today is quite similar to a communist apparel factory, minus the advertising expenses: churn out standard clothing at a large scale with minimum costs and put it on the market at a price level almost everyone can afford. For the capitalist factory, the sales are generated by advertising, while the communist factory's sales are insured by the customers' lack of alternatives.

[storeynicholas]

Costi - It wasn't an experiment it was an actual ancient society which was run along the lines of securing social and economic productivity for all members and relied upon inter-dependence and common property: "from each according to his means and unto each according to his needs". I actually quite like this from my own point of view - as my means are slight and my needs are great. I just had to give my daughter my new passport number and she split her sides as in the middle (I hadn't noticed) is the number 666
NJS

[Simon A]

Utopia Chinese-style

"Let your community be small, with only a few people;
Keep tools in abundance, but do not depend upon them;
Appreciate your life and be content with your home;
Sail boats and ride horses, but don't go too far;
Keep weapons and armour, but do not employ them;
Let everyone read and write,
Eat well and make beautiful things.

Live peacefully and delight in your own society;
Dwell within cock-crow of your neighbours,
But maintain your independence from them. "

Lao Zi, "DaoDeJing" cc 500 BC


Line 7 is particularly pertinent

[Costi]

THIS is "THEIR" hand made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztSG83M3yTg
See how people operate their machines and bits of cloth with their hands? The suits are, therefore, HAND made!
Apropos the parallel "bespoke" term discussion, perhaps it would be good to call them "tailor made clothes". Workers on an assembly line in a factory are not tailors. Only a trained tailor can deliver a true bespoke suit. And Armani certainly cannot pretend that their suits are made by tailors! (I hope!)

[Merc]

There are certainly different degrees of bespoke. .

i agree.

[couch]

A propos the topic of using "hand-made" as a marketing gimmick intended to induce a sense of (dubious) high quality and rarity in the naive purchaser: in my museum days one of the funniest pieces of writing I ever came across was a short parody by Bruce McCall in the Dec. 21, 1981 New Yorker of advertisements for the products of "limited edition" mills like the Franklin Mint. The title is "Rolled in Rare Bohemian Onyx, Then Vulcanized by Hand." Someone has transcribed the text here and I commend it to your perusal.

Things got interesting when the Franklin Mint's owners dangled a very substantial donation before the Philadelphia Museum of Art (the Mint is not far from the city), on the condition that the donor recognition should be the renaming of the rotunda housing the great Rogier van der Weyden Diptych of the Crucifixion as the "Franklin Mint Gallery." Though one of the company's owners sat on the Museum's board, it's hard to escape the conclusion that they were attempting to buy cachet by associating the firm's name and its "collectibles" with a masterpiece of northern European renaissance painting. After some hesitation, the $1 million donation was accepted and the rotunda renamed, but subsequent reinstallations have replaced the van der Weyden with Renoirs, Cezannes, and van Goghs. No doubt this change didn't faze the donors since van Gogh's "Sunflowers" is more likely than the Crucifixion diptych to be recognizable by potential Franklin Mint customers anyway. And some of them will remember that another of the "Sunflowers" series brought $39.9 million at auction in 1987, more than three times the previous record for any work of art. So surely collectibles are a good investment . . . .

[marcelo]

THIS is "THEIR" hand made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztSG83M3yTg
See how people operate their machines and bits of cloth with their hands? The suits are, therefore, HAND made!
Apropos the parallel "bespoke" term discussion, perhaps it would be good to call them "tailor made clothes". Workers on an assembly line in a factory are not tailors. Only a trained tailor can deliver a true bespoke suit. And Armani certainly cannot pretend that their suits are made by tailors! (I hope!)

Thanks for this. Many steps are shown, indeed - even the sewing of lining and jacket together. But interestingly enough, the process of gluing, by means of thermo fusion, interlining and jacket is not shown, presumably out of consideration for gentlemen who would not be able to endure the scene.

[Costi]

It is merely suggested, like a murder scene in a general audience film, at 0:33 and 0:40.
If your heart can take it, here is the full thing, with accompanying voice explaining the process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2S3eLrd ... re=related at 1:14.

But you absolutely need to read the COMMENTS on this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1L0PZvSDuA&feature=fvw, even if you don't have the patience to watch the clip. It makes me wonder whether bespoke is, indeed, doomed to extinction... By starvation!

[Milo]

A propos the topic of using "hand-made" as a marketing gimmick intended to induce a sense of (dubious) high quality and rarity in the naive purchaser: in my museum days one of the funniest pieces of writing I ever came across was a short parody by Bruce McCall in the Dec. 21, 1981 New Yorker of advertisements for the products of "limited edition" mills like the Franklin Mint. The title is "Rolled in Rare Bohemian Onyx, Then Vulcanized by Hand." Someone has transcribed the text here and I commend it to your perusal.

Thank you couch. This is hilarious!

Milo

[shredder]

The various replies in this thread are collectively quite revealing: it is relatively easy to cite examples of what is definitely NOT hand made but is actually quite difficult to define what hand made is or to define where the boundary between hand made and machine made lies. The ambiguity can be exploited by marketers or be used as an avenue of attack by critics. My area of expertise is not in apparel but in another product category: I must admit that there is a rather broad grey area between what is categorically not hand made and what is done entirely by hand every step of the way. Within that grey zone, there is a segment where one can characterise as hand made without having to apologise but there are also other segments. So, where's the border line? I don't actually know. Of course, the characterisation does nothing to change the fact that a piece took X man hours to complete, to a particular quality level. It does not change the product but does affect the perception of it.

Just going back to the advert that prompted my question, I thought it was interesting how Sartoriani and Armani chose different approaches to describing their product offer, each emphasising a different element of their MTM product. Sartoriani chose 'bespoke' to invoke a certain perception while Armani chose 'hand' to invoke another kind of perception.

s

[Gruto]

The various replies in this thread are collectively quite revealing: it is relatively easy to cite examples of what is definitely NOT hand made but is actually quite difficult to define what hand made is or to define where the boundary between hand made and machine made lies.

An idea: why not define a handmade or bespoke suit here at the London Lounge? The Savile Row Association has tried to define a Savile Row suit, but the terms don't say much as far as I remember (I can't find them now at the website). Or will it be too prosaic to approach the bespoke art in such a technical way?

[Costi]

An idea: why not define a handmade or bespoke suit here at the London Lounge?

Great idea! We have such a treasure of collective and shared information here that we could well write an Encyclopedia of the Apparel Arts, so giving a definition shouldn't be all that difficult. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a garment to be called "bespoke"? Let's first agree on this and then we can move forward to formulating the text of the definition.

NECESSARY conditions:
- individual pattern drawn by a trained cutter on the basis of an individual's measures and physical features observed
- styled according to the customer's express desires
- sewn by one or more trained tailors, using mostly handsewing (needle, thread and thimble) except on long seams where a single needle sewing machine may be used (I think we shouldn't limit "bespoke" or even "handmade" to 100% handsewn garments)
- at least one fitting needed to make all necessary adjustments to the garment
- finished by hand (buttonholes, sewing the buttons, ironing), without the aid of industrial machinery (buttonhole machines, button sewing machines, flat presses)

We shouldn't make this too restrictive, but not leave out important aspects, either. We mustn't forget that some features (such as turning in the seam allowance along the trousers' legs and handsewing it in place), while adding to the (perceived) QUALITY of the garment, are not NECESSARY conditions for a garment to be called "bespoke".
What else? Are these conditions also SUFFICIENT?

[Greger]

Great idea! We have such a treasure of collective and shared information here that we could well write an Encyclopedia of the Apparel Arts, so giving a definition shouldn't be all that difficult. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a garment to be called "bespoke"? Let's first agree on this and then we can move forward to formulating the text of the definition.

NECESSARY conditions:
- individual pattern drawn by a trained cutter on the basis of an individual's measures and physical features observed I suppose this includes those who can adapt a stock pattern so it "fits" the customer (there are some very good tailors who do it this way and I wouldn't want to exclude them, because they are using craftsmanship skills that go back centuries).
- styled according to the customer's express desires
- sewn by one or more trained tailors, using mostly handsewing (needle, thread and thimble) except on long seams where a single needle sewing machine may be used (I think we shouldn't limit "bespoke" or even "handmade" to 100% handsewn garments)
- at least one fitting needed to make all necessary adjustments to the garment For a new pattern at least two fitting or more (this has got to be required (even tailorandcutter says that much)), and for extablished personal pattern- one fitting maybe enough.
- finished by hand (buttonholes, sewing the buttons, ironing), without the aid of industrial machinery (buttonhole machines, button sewing machines, flat presses)

We shouldn't make this too restrictive, but not leave out important aspects, either. We mustn't forget that some features (such as turning in the seam allowance along the trousers' legs and handsewing it in place), while adding to the (perceived) QUALITY of the garment, are not NECESSARY conditions for a garment to be called "bespoke".
What else? Are these conditions also SUFFICIENT?

At one time everything was done by craftsmen. Then the industrial age came and they have tried ever since to convince us that they are close enough to craftsmanship quality, so buy from us. I think bespoke tailors and custom furniture makers are sort of par and have similarities to compare back and forth.

[David Hober]

.....
I work in the Republic of Georgia, where the Communists merrily dismantled a thriving 3000 year old textile industry and replaced it with dark satanic mills, so to speak. Now even they lie dormant..
......

Simon A,

Please tell us more about the history of the textile industry in Georgia. Were they still using natural dyes and were they colorfast?