Who are our tailors?

[alden]

All good things must come to an end.

The number of true bespoke craftsmen is dwindling. With very few exceptions the community is populated by men in their sixties and seventies. There are a handful of youngsters in their late fifties, and a startling happy few in their forties.

Need we prepare for the bespoke doomsday that lies a decade or so away? I think so.

But rather than prepare for the final accounting, many clothing entrepreneurs see the renewed interest in bespoke spiraling to the forefront of fashion as a great opportunity.

We have gone to great pains to describe the traditional bespoke process and differentiate same from MTM and RTW. But have we forgotten to describe the men and woman who claim to be tailors, to understand who they are, where they come from? Or have we been content to study only what they do?

A traditional tailor spent his teens as an apprentice, cooped up in the back room of a tailoring house for seven to ten years learning the craft. Many started at an even younger age, sewing buttons, preparing linings until they could sew their first bits of cloth. The very best hands from among these tiny gloves continued in the trade, hired as alterations tailors or coat makers.

The next decades were spent getting jobs from nervous cutters intended for customers they would never see. The best of the best, if they had a proper mentor, might expect to become cutters themselves or make the hazard filled decision to create their own workshop. But very few were so fortunate. Most toiled in the back rooms for a lifetime.

A tiny fraction of these men and women are being recognized today for their achievements and skill as they step into the light. The hours of patient toil, the passion that made those hours possible and the pride of seeing a handsome garment from what was a pile of lifeless cloth and thread, this is a tailor. And it doesn’t matter a whit what the style is, the construction techniques or the country of origin. This is a fraternity we admire.

Now the clothing entrepreneurs will try to convince you that their factories are full of tailors as well. But a man pulled from the ranks of poverty or unemployment to sit in front of a sewing machine twelve hours a day is not a tailor. His gestures of machining sleeves or sewing buttons are not the work of a tailor. They are the work of a factory hand.

I recently visited a few factories of this ilk in Italy, immense hangars filled with sewing machines and busy hands making “bespoke” clothing.

In view of these visits I thought it opportune to recall who our artisans are and thank them for their work.

Cheers

Michael Alden