Tailoring for Women

“Show me where you work; show me how you do it”.

I am thrilled by the way my clients want to collaborate in the design of their garments.  Their curiosity seems to be twofold: a desire to learn more about the practical details; cloth, techniques, tools.  Secondly, an intrigue with the more artistic side of things such as proportion, colour balance, placement of detail etc.

I have been thinking about some of the parallels with architecture.

A building is made from both rigid and flexible elements.  The final structure has to be strong enough to maintain its form, but possess a degree of flexibility as the climate, inside and out, affects the physics of the materials from which it is made.  So, the constituent components all influence each other.

Garments crafted in the art of bespoke are created in a similar way - with a unique layering of materials and methods of combining them.  The art lies in achieving a finished product that is soft on the body but at the same time accentuates the natural attributes of the materials used.

Some materials making up the inner architecture of a bespoke suit are:

• chest canvas - short, coarse fibres in the weave provide foundation and allow flexibility
• laptair - long, rigid fibres supporting the weft of a fabric help preserve its width.
• domette - soft, supple cloth secured over the coarser fibres of the laptair preventing their intrusion past the inner linings.
• silesia - a strong, densely woven fabric that adds a stable foundation in the fixing of other materials
• pocketings - robust enough to hold an array of objects yet retain its shape, and be comfortable on the skin

These materials are layered and secured with a matrix of different types of stitches, each backing the other up.

• basting cotton - soft thread for loose stitching such as padding and basting which can be easily removed
• poly-cotton blend - used for machining and some hand sewing
• silk - because of its lustre and strength it is used for the final topstitching and buttonholes
• polyester - strongest, the thickest grades are used for backstitching

“The sewing machine is used for almost all seams and darts, but 75% of all stitches in a bespoke made suit are still done by hand, to ensure the most accurate shaping of the fabric.  Today’s tailors continue to practice their art almost exactly as it was practiced a century ago.  Not because slower is necessarily better, but because these methods produce body and form, detail and durability which newer faster methods of tailoring are simply unable to equal.”
(Classic Tailoring Techniques.  Roberto Cabrera/Patricia Flaherty Meyers.)

With modern, mass produced clothing, many of these details are eliminated.  One example is the way in which many layers are secured by one line of machine stitching.  If this line breaks, then it all breaks.

We spend our lives wrapped up in our clothes - we might as well know something about them!

Tags: design, suit, womens suits