tteplitzmd wrote:Just cash in your remaining chips and move to another casino.
Well I do think that you have brought up an important point: when do you cut your losses with a tailor and run?
This can be a simple issue. Or a tough one.
We agree that tailoring is a highly personal experience. The importance of a personal relationship and history a client has with his tailor cannot be minimised. To me, it is one of the pleasures of bespoke and if it is absent, well, I miss it.
I am, probably to my detriment, less interested in the product than in the experience of bespoke. Who needs more clothes at this stage?
Could a continuing personal relationship and history help account for some clients' acceptance of much mediocre work, or indeed unknowing blindness to mediocrity? Perhaps.
But regardless, I am sure that this personal aspect of tailoring helps account for why I am such a big fan of the Italian tailors; they are simply such characters, in turn congenial, histrionic, engaging, maddening, as to make the bespoke experience so deeply personal that it adds immensely to the pleasure, nee joy, I take in wearing their creations.
Each Italian suit I wear, for better or worse, has a personal story and memory; I remember the fittings, the tailors and seamstresses, the individuals, who together worked to make this suit for me by their hands. I remember the espresso, the scotch, the quiet, personal conversations and insights into their personal lives. Call me sentimental. But it is all about the people. I take more pleasure from their quiet satisfaction in making me a suit than I derive from it myself.
You quickly distinguish who is sincere, genuine and simple from those who are too clever by half. You also understand who is talented and who is simply not despite their best efforts.
Though connections are hard to break with a sincere man, regardless the result. It can be a difficult choice.
Such connections are much more difficult to form in the larger tailoring shops and in the metropolises and I miss that. It very much depends on the owners as well. But I will always prefer to find a small shop owned and operated by a family, or the people working there, people working in an ancient craft, using their hands, trying to make a living in a modern world which is quickly overtaking them.
The above thoughts don't relate to Lachter, Haste and Kent specifically...they are just random thoughts prodded in my mind by this thread.
Indeed, to come back to the original question: when is it best to move on?
Well, I suppose each and everyone of us has to answer that question. Bespoke is more than bespoke. It means very different things to each and everyone of us. We know that. The subject is large. I'll stop here.
Well, one more thought, a reminiscence really, of a visit years ago, to the Florentine tailor, Loris Vestrucci, with whom I never had a suit made, much to my misfortune, but whose deep pride in each and every one of his creations, genuine enthusiasm and joie de vivre, I will remember as much as much as his fabulous creations, wizened face and cigar.
A toast to Loris and his kind of the old school!!
