The First ReTailors were actually Real Tailors

Acquire a piece of History

The first retailors were suitmakers, who would conveniently stock and recut or re-tailor garments. Over 150 plus years ago this previously time consuming practice of making suits one at a time was greatly replaced with the new retailors and men's stores. This satisfied the expanding middle class with reasonable product and service. The term retailor in effect had come from the word “tailor”. In the start of the industrial era, the locomotive catapulted manufacturing by distributing and hence created greater need for production in England and Europe.

Tailors shops then would expertly take off jacket backs, sleeves and often the collar off to balance a garment. Today salesmen innocently button up customer’s jackets by rote to make the garment look better, but not understanding the fact that the jacket needs to be balanced, so it closes creating a proper silhouette.

The rise of employment in the industry  was apparent three times 400 years that has been instrumental in building the middle class. The first time was at Saville row when London was the worlds largest city. Then during the American depression when coal miners took a job in their new suit, prospecting clients, measuring and selling the outcome. The third time was in the 1960’s when U.S manufacturing and retail MTM was at it’s heyday, before outsourcing overseas depleted 90% of its jobs in the 1990’s. Unfortunately the easy part seemed to be measuring when the standards of fit were low. Order takers had various degrees of success with their measurements and guesswork. The success rate would vary for them because measurements do not account for shape.

The retail practice of marking up and selling on sale and thereby charging for alterations has lowered standards and men’s expectations of tailoring service and ultimately in the last 40 years and made the suit a much less popular value today. The perception of alterations as tailoring is an indication of modern cultures opportunities to revive my craft not through sewing, but through cutting and designing, a much more fun practice and business. When men realize that quality and classic style is painlessly available they will embrace their tailoring designer and with experience see the sea of misfits. The will embrace authentic tailoring as anti-fashion because it has substance because of its looks that last. Fine tailoring is about client confidence from support. It is not feminine and exocentric as is fashion, but personal and egocentric.

Ideally fine tailoring, is human in its integrating the upper and lower torso in a dramatic silhouette, without buttoning, that is sartorial completion and suggests a man’s prime. This is not about fashion but about the acquisition of a gentlemen’s piece of history, his balance of his character with the practice of some class.  This is one of the few new–old values in the 21^st C. that can change a man’s world and even maybe with web training from this site,  bring home historic employment to the local tailor with our brave new tailoring-designer.

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www.tailoringdesigner.com