Tailoring for Women

I spend much of my time focusing on the close-up detail of cutting and sewing, so half way through a full-on year at TfW I decided to take a break and treat my eyes to a panoramic feast, thanks to the Grand Canyon. The trip of a lifetime – and I’m still feeling the benefits, months later.

TfW was created nearly three years ago to cater for the women’s business suit market, and these garments are certainly proving to be our staple fare. (more…)

Dr. Frances Carter is seriously accomplished. Despite her retirement from active medical practice, she continues to teach and lecture throughout Europe and Asia. I have made many outfits for her business wardrobe over the last 10 years, but now that she has retired she commissions my time for tailoring lessons. She tells me that preparing for this new hobby has been the perfect transition out of the regular work routine of her profession. (more…)

Nobody ever thinks of buttons unless they come off. But I can tell you there’s a whole technology that exists around buttons and buttonholes. I guess most people imagine that tailors know all there is to know about buttons, but it’s far from the case. When I need some special button feature, I pop along to the trade’s best-known button specialist (more…)

I’ve already written several times about one of my favourite networking organisations, the City Women’s Network. And last week I finally got to give a presentation at one of their regular meetings. In fact it was a forum about how to develop a global aspect to your business. These days, it’s not just multinational companies that can operate globally. Even a small, specialist trade like mine can – in fact needs – a global dimension. And of course it’s now possible thanks to the internet.

I was one of a panel of four speakers. You can read about the others here. They all had legal or commercial backgrounds so at first felt I might be rather out of place, talking about my very specialised craft. But when I started to mull it over, I hit on the idea of looking at the issue in reverse.

Most people think of ‘globalisation’ in terms of establishing a presence on every continent. But my kind of globalisation is about bringing the world to my doorstep. I was reminded of a quote by my famous countryman, Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door’.

I was able to relate how important it was for specialist crafts to group together when marketing to clients globally. TfW has alliances with specialist shoemakers, hat makers, and even gunsmiths. But the big difference between our respective trades and most global brands is that we offer something unique to every client. A can of coke is the same in every corner of the globe, but a TfW suit is unique to the person wearing it.

It was flattering that everyone had favourable comments, mostly responding to the visuals of colour, texture and the look of quality in the products. I had shown images of a hand made shotgun, a set of shoe lasts and broadened my talk to include taking craft global. In Britain, there is an authentic tradition of proper training in these crafts. Support of the ancient guilds and titled craftsmen are renowned.  This attracts clients from all over the world.

I explained how the brand is not the item, but the person – the maker; and how that develops through one’s professional relationships with individual clients. An important part of the bespoke tradition is the degree to which a client may participate in the conceptualizing and creation of a unique luxury product. And in talking with colleagues in companies such as Jaeger or Holland & Holland, bespoke is becoming the new luxury experience and ownership means not just buying the product but buying into its creation.

The audience was intrigued with how different my business was to theirs – TfW is not about putting a widget on every coffee table in the world, the opposite in fact. But it was a good fit for the forum.

I make no secret of my love of craft – the special skills, the attention to detail, the creativity. This week I’m privileged to speak at a meeting of the City Women’s Network (London), a forum for female professionals from all sectors and I’m going to return to my favourite theme of craft in the guise of tailoring. Quite by chance I came across an episode of the UK cult TV series ‘The Dragon’s Den’ the other day. (more…)

You might think that bespoke tailoring inhabits a rather old-fashioned, fuddy duddy world where respect for tradition and convention is more important than innovation and fashion. Well it’s true that I’ve posted several articles celebrating the traditions of the tailoring craft and fabrics made of natural materials. Fine tailoring tends to have a single objective – to make the person look and feel good and to reflect their status in professional or social circles. We’re stuck with certain given factors: two arms, two legs, a head, a torso. And it seems unlikely that this will change much in the near future. So there’s little room for radical innovation, certainly not in terms of shape, structure or form.

We’re used to fabrics which have many different properties – heat resistant, cold resistant, porous, impermeable, light, heavy, rigid, flexible, contour-hugging, loose. And of course man-made fibres have been around for almost a century already. But if you look at those, especially nylon, polyester, acrylic and polyolefin used in clothing textiles, their main purpose has been to imitate or improve on natural fibres. They weren’t invented to fulfil new functions.

On the other hand, the world of fashion has always had a weakness for the extravagant or the bizarre, such as garments made of glass, feathers,  paper, or decorated with Swarovski crystals. Clothing materials can consist of almost anything, but the end result is still a piece of clothing – that’s all it does.

The best garments respond sensitively to movement and change of shape. And of course the secret of the tailor’s craft is to design garments which can anticipate many different postures and gestures using materials which will maintain a basic look no matter how contorted.

But recently I came across an article in The Economist and it made me realise that there could be a real open door to innovation after all. If textiles can respond to movement and manipulation why not also to other stimuli, such as changes in temperature, light levels – or sound? Why not a singing suit? The Economist report outlines some recent research by Dr. Yoel Fink and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have managed to create a fibre which can respond to acoustic or electrical waves, rather like a microphone or loudspeaker. Imagine a microphone in the shape of a length of thread.

The science is mind-bogglingly complex, but the idea is simple. Now we have the possibility of a textile which can not only respond to changes of shape and position, but which can ‘hear’ vibrations and sound waves. So far the fibres produced are rather too large to be able to weave into a wearable textile, but that’s only a matter of time. And the open doors? Imagine hosiery which could detect obstructions in blood flow in critical areas of the leg by ‘listening’ to the blood circulation, like a permanent stethoscope.

Sadly, TfW is not yet geared up to working with ‘intelligent’ textiles, but you can be sure that when they arrive, we’ll be the first to offer bespoke services with the intelligent fibres you can trust!

Last year I posted about the wonderful Matsuri which took place in Spitalfields Market in East London, just opposite my studio. Well, it’s back, and this time I’ve managed to organise my posting to let you know in advance! So if you are anywhere near London this Saturday (Sept 18), try to find time to get to Spitalfields (close to the City) and I guarantee you will be overwhelmed by an extraordinary sensory adventure – the colours, sounds, smells, tastes and textures of Japan. (more…)

During the summer my thoughts were solicited by THINK, a style magazine based in Dubai. It was running an article on the latest in bespoke tailoring and how a personal ‘image’ is so important even in the highly regimented worlds of international business and finance. It was especially encouraging for me that the magazine’s correspondent, Ashlee Beard, chose to mention the female angle (more…)

If you wear one of these…

Where do you put one of these?

We all know the traditional answer – in the handbag of course. And we all know the consequences. It rings at an embarrassing moment. You don’t want to be noticed but you have to excavate the handbag to find the phone and switch it off. It stops ringing just when you find it. But for other more aesthetic reasons women sing the praises of handbags. (more…)

Before Tailoring for Women there was The Concert Store. Making concert platform garments for busy professional musicians and singers was in many ways a dream occupation for me. The tailoring craft in the service of superb musical experiences thanks to star clients such as Michael Tilson Thomas, Tamas Vasary, Seiji Ozawa, Steven Isserlis, Gil Shaham, Joshua Bell, the King’s Singers – and even Lou Reed! (more…)