The Brotherly Spirit
One of my first impressions on attending the CTDA’s Designer Forum in New York last summer was how the membership is composed almost entirely of small to medium-sized businesses. The apparel industry as a whole is notoriously dominated by massive multinational corporations, which in turn are often just assets in the portfolios of even larger holding companies. Holding companies don’t exist to make anything but money, and that ethos has unfortunately trickled down through much of the industry, eventually pooling at the bottom with retail operations that too often don’t know what they’re selling and don’t care whom they’re selling to.
The CTDA represents an entirely different approach. We make clothes. Hopefully we make money as well, but that’s probably not why we’re in this business. We make clothes not as manufactured commodities, but as artisanal craft, by hand, one garment at a time. Not an especially scalable enterprise — hence the scarcity of large operations — but it’s a proud one, full of expertise, opinion, passion, and personality.
It makes sense that any organization aspiring to unite such spirited individuals would itself have to be something of a noble undertaking. Reading through the CTDA’s 125th Anniversary book (which everyone should pick up if they haven’t), it’s clear that from the start that this organization has always been of, by, and for the small businesses that have always made the finest clothes in the land. Consider this manifesto, drawn up in Columbus, Ohio in the fall of 1880 to establish the CTDA’s first incarnation, The Foreman Custom Cutters Association of America:
To promote the interest of Custom Tailoring, by overcoming selfishness and trade jealousies; mingling together in a democratic fashion to cultivate a more brotherly spirit among the members of the craft; to hold meetings for mutual interchange of ideas along lines that make for the welfare of the business. To give freely of our knowledge to the less experienced cutter, thereby elevating the standard of the craft.
Even allowing for the more elevated language of the time, this is a charter of impressive idealism. In today’s take-no-prisoners, winner-take-all marketplace, it seems positively antique, a document of pre-modern, almost naive sincerity. Most business school graduates today surely regard selfishness and jealousy as the fuel of capitalism, if not its very soul. These men (and they were all men at that point), however, clearly felt differently, and as 125 years of CTDA archives attest, they embodied this “brotherly spirit” in the name of improving “the welfare of the business” and “the standard of their craft” through countless forums, classes, articles, and resources through the decades — all of which the CDTA continues to offer today.
Why such common cause? In part, it seems clear that community was its own end. A major element of the anniversary book are photographic portraits commemorating the various ensembles worn or presented by CTDA members at its gatherings. Some are timelessly elegant to the modern eye (e.g. Bill Fioravanti in any decade) some delightfully less so (e.g. 1975 fashion as imagined by 1958; the jumpsuits weren’t too far off the mark!), but they were no doubt all exquisitely madegarments, and are described in deserving detail. More often than not they’re modeled by the makers themselves: overwhelmingly middle-aged men benefiting greatly by their tailoring skills, but all beaming with pride in a spotlight that comes too rarely to those who spend their lives making others look good. For these people, the recognition and respect of their far-flung peers was surely among the greatest appeals of the CTDA. Judging by the elegant outfits and easy cameradie at the DFNY’s social gatherings last summer, it still is.
Perhaps the other, more hard-nosed rationale for the CTDA’s comradely principles was the need to make common cause against an all-too-familiar threat. The 1880 manifesto continues from the earlier excerpt: There is much to be done by the cutters of this country if our trade is not to suffer still further loss of lethargy and indifference among the craft, and to combat the inroads of the ready-made.
In other words, the laments of today’s custom tailors and clothiers about the decline of sartorial standards and the irresistible tide of cheap RTW are nothing new, and have in fact been there from the very beginning. We have always been underdogs, handicapped by our own exacting standards and by the inherently, gloriously inefficient enterprise of making clothes for individuals. It’s truly always been a small world for our tribe, and these days a shrinking one.
Britain has a revitalized Savile Row to underwrite its claim as the spiritual home of bespoke menswear, Italy’s artisans have their ancient ties of family and region, and some sort of professional fraternity is doubtless emerging in the vast workshops of Chinese tailors; in the United States, however, we’re spread thin, even in the great cities. The CTDA is all that truly binds us, not as competitors, but as community. We hope you’ll support it at the DFNY this month. See you there!
By Andrew Yamato