The London Lounge

I know that many of you are fabric connoisseurs. Beyond selecting and buying fabric for future garments, is it possible for those of us that are merely customers and not in the trade to order and collect swatch books? I would love to have a current set from H.Lesser to browse at my my leisure and to compare swatches to the rest of my wardrobe.

I realize that I am of course welcome to browse at my tailor, but that does not satisfy either my deliberate pace of browsing or desire to collect interesting examples of fabric without ordering by the yard.

Krustyjonez,

Sometimes you can get swatches from the mills directly. You may have to be charming to achieve your goal..... Offer them your FedEx account number to make shipping easy.

Other times it is straight forward. As an example we sell swatch sets of our silks, that we weave all the time.

Also for the wool mills that are difficult, you may see about getting last year's swatch sets as a way of building your collection. Also you can get on eBay old swatch sets from time to time.

Sounds like you are a real fabric lover.

Good luck with your search.

What a great idea -- I have often considered this myself. Jodek, Lesser's US distributor, informed me that Lesser charges them for each swatch book a "fabric equivalent" price. Therefore, if the cuttings total up a meter of fabric, Jodek owes Lesser whatever one meter of said fabric costs. As such, dishing out fabric books is quite an expensive proposition and they try to be quite selective in what books they offer to what tailor. For example, they will not automatically send the Lesser 150s book to Tailor Joe in Iowa.

The alternative thats worked very well for me is to have good relationships with a few tailors such that you can always go to their ateliers and browse all the books they have. I will sometimes go and tell the tailor I just wanted to look at the books -- not bother him at all -- and peruse his collection.

My guess is that if you were willing to pay the costs of the books, some distributors may let you have a copy. But, building such a library may be quite expensive.

krustyjonez wrote:I know that many of you are fabric connoisseurs. Beyond selecting and buying fabric for future garments, is it possible for those of us that are merely customers and not in the trade to order and collect swatch books? I would love to have a current set from H.Lesser to browse at my my leisure and to compare swatches to the rest of my wardrobe.

I realize that I am of course welcome to browse at my tailor, but that does not satisfy either my deliberate pace of browsing or desire to collect interesting examples of fabric without ordering by the yard.