An Appreciation, an Introduction, and an Appeal

I was walking down 7th Avenue at 57th in Manhattan on a crisp September morning when I saw her. A bronze-colored hacking coat, impeccably cut with svelte, liquid drape, worn over a cream cashmere turtleneck. A trim cream pencil skirt, hitting just below stockinged knees, snapping tight with each step of her ankle-height heels. The embodiment of New York chic.

She was also ancient. Time had stooped her shoulders and twisted her frame. Her closely cropped hair was thin and grey. She walked slowly, with one hand firmly on the stiff handle of her companion (seeing eye?) dog and the other carrying a ribbon-tied parcel (which I liked to think was a gift from a secret admirer). I slackened my pace to continue my own secret admiration of clothing that embraced her exactly as she was: the collar gripping her bowed neck, the waist trim but nowhere tight, the coat’s kick-pleated skirt gracefully tracing her hips, and the beautifully hand-felled hem showing a bit of honest wear itself.

Surely this is the custom tailor’s greatest art. Not the sheathing of sleek young bodies that would look good in anything, but the dignified draping of those a bit less so. As a look, it’s both classic and modern — truly timeless.

At the dawn of modern tailoring, the art lay largely in the construction of artifice — pinching the body here and padding it there into an idealized, heavily rendered form. Over time, as tastes and technique evolved, it grew more naturalistic, less about sculpting the body’s appearance than draping it. Today, custom tailoring is more than ever about embracing the body beneath, covering it with no more and no less cloth than required for a comfortable, natural fit that moves with the wearer. Where once the tailor’s goal may have been to impart an air of power or rectitude to his clients, today he seeks to confer the elegance of ease.

Increasingly these changes are being driven not by fashion editors, designers, and other traditional arbiters of sartorial authority, but by the wearers themselves — particularly the detail-obsessed enthusiasts who’ve honed their knowledge of tailored clothing through the internet. The communities they’ve formed range from the loosely affiliated legions of Instagrammers to the drilled-down aficionados of Styleforum, but they all overwhelmingly share a love of clothes not just as elements of style, but as a hobby — even a discipline — to be studied and mastered. Anything that lets these discerning sartorialists behind the scenes or under the slicky marketed hood of menswear is catnip, eagerly sought and shared across various platforms. This represents a unique opportunity for the CTDA.

This is where I come in as the CTDA’s new official bloggerrol, because I’m one of the guys I’m talking about here. I’ve had a deep and abiding interest in classic menswear clothing my entire adult life, and since 2009 I’ve been a freelance writer and filmmaker for various menswear/tailoring media (e.g. Put This On, A Suitable Wardrobe, Riddle Magazine, The Styleforum Journal) and institutions (The Museum at FIT), the culmination of which was “The Making of a Coat” — a detailed video and essay series I produced about the handcraft bespoke process of Henry Poole-trained and Golden Shears award-winning tailor Rory Duffy. Last January I joined the menswear industry more formally when I was hired at Alan Flusser Custom. Alan’s books were fundamental to my sartorial self-education, and the opportunity to learn about the high end of the trade at his side was just the next step I was looking for.

I’m very excited to be on the CTDA team because I believe our goals as a trade organization are so closely aligned with the interests of our clients: the promotion of custom tailoring by way of detailed, intelligent explanations of what goes into it, from the milling of the cloth to the finishing of the buttonholes. As a matter of general interest for a relatively traditional trade, I’ll also look at what’s gone into it in the past. Curious about 18th century tailoring? I’ve already arranged to visit and interview the tailor interpreter at the Revolutionary War era Trenton Barracks. Interested in the socio-economically transformative power of tailored clothing? I’d like to write about the various non-profits that arrange for the donation and fitting of second-hand suits to needy job applicants. I’ll be publishing a new article on the CTDA’s website every month, and stoking discussion about it on our social media feeds in the intervening weeks.

Needless to say, I welcome any and all feedback and suggestions. It’s a bit intimidating to be a non-tailor writing about custom tailoring for an audience composed largely of custom tailors; I’m sure many of you know from encounters with the new breed of internet-educated client that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and I certainly don’t want to be guilty of adding to the #menswear noise by putting out or perpetuating any misinformation. This is why I’d like to end this piece and start the blog with some open-ended questions to the CTDA membership: What are you interested in seeing here? What sort of content would be most professionally useful or interesting? Given that this blog will hopefully have a readership not only of members, but of current and potential clients, what would you like them to know about or understand?

Part of the answer might be determining what sort of content you yourselves might have to contribute. A lot of very interesting material can be generated simply by this blog acting as an editorial review of members’ own offerings, contextualizing their products and services in articles that promote the trade more generally. For example, a cloth merchant’s latest offering of natural stretch wool could be a starting point for a piece examining the history of stretch fabrics in tailoring more generally (e.g. “wool elastique” US Army service uniforms in WWII) , with suggestions for its current application (e.g. the trim fits currently in vogue).

For my part, one of the perks of this new role is the opportunity to meet with and learn from as many of you as possible, and I’m especially looking forward to doing so at the Designer Forum in NYC, where I hope to be shooting video of the event’s proceedings for future documentary and promotional purposes. In the meantime, being based in New York myself, it’s easy for me to meet with anyone here or passing through, so please don’t hesitate to contact me directly; the more I learn about the CTDA, the better I’ll be able to promote it.

Best regards,

Andrew Yamato
dayamato@gmail.com