The Latest Fashion Trend? A Great Tailor
5 minute read
In the noughties, every self-respecting fashionista in London and New York had a diminutive dog peeping out of her exorbitantly expensive quilted handbag. Compact, portable canines signified status in the same way as a red-soled shoe or the interlacing Cs of a Chanel logo. While commentators claim that the noughties are back – what with Bennifer reunited and Britney free – the revival doesn’t include the return of a ‘sleeve dog’ accessory, thanks be to Celebrity. Less sensationally and more sensibly, 20 years later the latest prize ‘possession’ of every style-loving woman worth her several thousand social media followers is a good, old-fashioned tailor.
If you’re a Trinny Woodall fan as I am, you’ll be as familiar with Azucena (pronounced A-Susanna) as you are with Chloe and Molly. She has the magic hands of a good cosmetic surgeon – a few strategic nips and tucks by Azucena and you’ll enjoy the same smoothing and slimming effects, but at a fraction of the cost. Jordan Trent, aka @theelegantstylist, frequently buys clothes on ebay and then has them altered. On her Stories this week, she revealed some pieces she’d recently had reworked to better suit her, and she informed her followers that everybody needs a good tailor. Irish leather glove designer Paula Rowan, who designed Lady Gaga’s gloves for her role in House of Gucci, told me once that she has everything she buys altered so that each item looks like it was made for her. For these women, their tailor comes second in importance only to their hairstylist.
The idea of having a tailor sounds terribly grand though, doesn’t it? It conjures images of a woman with monogrammed stationery, silk sheets and heirloom jewellery; a woman who eats supper not dinner, who ‘lunches’ on weekdays and brunches at weekends.
I’m lucky. I grew up with my very own tailor. That’s not to say I was raised in an affluent household – bed linen was brushed cotton and fancy paper was as close to posh stationery as we got – but this was one luxury my siblings and I always enjoyed, because my mother was a talented seamstress (as we would have called her back then). In fact, she was a lot more than a sartorial fixer-upper. She could create from scratch without a pattern or anything other than a picture in her head, and she had the attention to detail of a couturier. Certainly the wedding dress she made for herself looked like something Hubert de Givenchy might have designed for Audrey Hepburn.
Apart from the standard shortening, lengthening and taking-in she performed constantly for her growing brood, and many of her neighbours, she could reinvent anything, and our family photo albums are filled with, now sepia-toned, polaroids of me and my siblings as kids wearing hand-me-downs reimagined into made-to-measure pieces. My sister had a favourite polkadot bikini reworked from one of my mother’s old maxi dresses; another sister’s most-loved sundress had once been a skirt belonging to my aunt; and the dress I wore to my first pre-Debs in the early 90s had been a curtain hanging in our front room just a few days before; curtains that were actually bought secondhand, so this was their third life so to speak.
Of course, handmade clothes didn’t seem like a luxury in the 70s and 80s. Slow fashion, like slow food, didn’t have the cache it does now. My mother cooked from scratch every evening, but it was the adverts for Findus Crispy Pancakes that made me drool. In those days, processed foods seemed posh and new clothes, whatever they were made of, glamorous. Secondhand had a hint of second best about it. Even 15 years ago, if someone had asked you where your dress was from, the most satisfying reply would have been Céline or McQueen. Five years later, the zeitgeist had shifted, so you’d smile and smugly explain, it’s vintage. These days, the most gratifying response is to reveal you found the dress in a charity shop and had it altered. This is the route of all sartorial envy. Everybody wants to be that woman: sustainable, savvy, individual and imaginative.
We didn’t know how sustainable we were growing up. In our home, necessity was the mother of invention. Money was scarce, but creative vision and talent were not. I miss my mother’s abilities hugely these days – she’s not up to doing much machine sewing now, although she can still hand-sew a hem exquisitely – and I have several items I need tweaked – from a pair of Zara suit trousers that are labelled an 8 but fit like a 12 (oh for consistent sizing…) to a tuxedo-style waistcoat that needs to be given a more streamlined shape. Thankfully, I am now once again one of those women who can say she has a tailor, as I found a brilliant local service a couple of years ago, which passed the ultimate test: resizing a Cos wool coat from a size 12 to an 8. It was beautifully done (it received my mother’s seal of approval which is huge) and since then I have felt that I can trust them with anything.
Finding a tailor multiplies the sartorial options open to you by a multitude, both inside your wardrobe and on the high street.
The best part of any sale (especially those of premium department stores and boutiques) is the final few days when discounts reach 70-80%. How often have you found an item and lamented, “If only it was in my size!” A trusted tailor makes the size and style of a garment irrelevant. If you love the colour, the fabric and the print, you can make it your own for just a few euro extra. Plus you become part of the design process. You have a hand in creating what you wear rather than just settling for something you see on a rail, which you like but don’t love, yet you can’t find anything better in that moment.
Of course, instant gratification is not part of this fashion equation. Buying in sales, secondhand or from charity shops is a game of chance. You’ll walk away empty handed sometimes, and when you do hit on a great find, patience is required between making your purchase, taking it to a tailor, and finally presenting it to your peers in its altered state. But if fashion needs more of anything, it’s the suspense and anticipation that was part and parcel of a pre-fast fashion, pre-social media era. Our click-and-buy, next-day-delivery culture is the equivalent of a sugar high, and it’s caused a kind of rot within the industry.
Sourcing a tailor and working with the clothes you own as well as those already in circulation is one way of contributing to a more sustainable future, but it’s also the pathway to a more interesting and individual wardrobe. Isn’t this the sartorial sweet spot we’re all looking for?
Marie Kelly, May 2022
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