Meat packaging

You might be able to find someone to do a cash job cheap but you are still too low. Most tailors in Savile Row are up around £5,000 these days.

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Yeah, don’t know where I was coming from with £1,500 given that’s what an off the peg one costs. I wasn’t thinking Saville Row where the rent must be astronomic, but I suppose any decent Tailor is going to be thousands.

Are there decent tailors outside London? Must be, albeit a very small number.

Hoi An = The best of tailoring :+1:

I gave all of my suits to a charity shop when we moved up here. Apart from two. A cheap Greenwoods black suit, that I bought (and kept) for funerals and a grey cashmere/silk mix one that I had made for me in India.

I’ll possibly never wear the grey one again, but I kind of like it. I hope I wear the black one as little as possible.

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worst suit I ever had made on my travels. HKG was really good, India was ok, Thailand adequate but Hoi An and Saigon were terrible.

Had a lovely leather jackets made in India as well.

OK

A beautiful place. Can’t wait to go back one day. Funnily enough I had a sports jacket made from cotton at Yaly couture about 8 years ago.

I thought it was was very good and I was very pleased with the jacket. It’s in the wardrobe somewhere. I showed them the cut I liked (I think they had books of pictures of different brands). They had a sort of booth linked to a computer which measured you. Quite remarkable really. 24 hours later a tailor made jacket was ready. It cost me less than £100.

They had seems of English cloth, wool, cashmere, you name it. They kept my measurements (although I’m a little bit bigger now!).

I had a shirt done too at another place. It’s nice to have sleeves exactly the right length and the body of the shirt the right length plus my other gripe with shirts, which you avoid, is when there a bit too big and the fabric flaps around.

No, not any more, not that I know of anyway. There are tailors of course but not of high quality. Anyone who works in the trade goes to London because that is where the best wages are.

Sadly, the quality even in Savile Row is very patchy. Top quality still exists but it isn’t everywhere. Some places which are charging top money are falling short of the required standard imv. Mind you, I think that has always been the case, it’s just more prevalent now. It’s sad.

The real thing has hours and hours of work in it. The sleeves, collar, shoulders should all be sewn by hand. The internal canvas should be completely hand padded. The lapels too. The buttonholes should all open and be made by hand, the edges should be stitched by hand as well as all the seams in the lining. There should be a minimum of three fittings on the first suit. The pattern should be cut individually for each client and adjusted after each fitting so that it is the same as the garment when finished. It can then become the starting point for the next order. The real thing is beautiful, is soft but has a kind of tension and a real 3 dimensional shape, obtained by careful pattern cutting, the canvas being made correctly and just the right amount of under pressing with a very hot, heavy iron. Any of the above corners can be cut, but to the trained eye they will stick out like a sore thumb! There are maybe 80 -100 hours in a proper bespoke suit, get a mechanic to spend that long working on your Porsche and see how much it would cost. And he would only be fitting pre-made parts, not making you something unique from scratch.

There is a massive difference between off the peg and a true bespoke suit but honestly if you can’t afford/find the real thing, stick with RTW because poor bespoke can be an absolute mess and a complete rip-off.

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6 silk/linen shirts, 2 casual (linen) trousers, 2 (linen) shorts, while Narelle had 3 x 50s style dresses, shorts, trousers, and some adjustments made to a jumpsuit. Made, with adjustments in 72 hours. A couple of faults found (they spotted them) and these were fixed a day later.
Great quality, good fabrics and what we wanted. Which is nice.

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Ritchie - if you have the inclination / time talk me through recommended woolen mills for suits (preferably British!).

Will have to be tomorrow, I’m off to bed now, quite exhausted after that last load of bollocks! :joy:

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Cloth mills generally don’t sell direct to the public, most of them sell through ‘merchants.’ I’m going to be very boring here (again) and tell you that unfortunately, like everything else it’s not what it was. Imv, the fall in standards is (among other things) probably down to the tailors. Recent generations have allowed the cloth merchants to sell them cloth that doesn’t perform like it used to because they haven’t demanded it/been able to sell enough. This has been happening since before I started in the trade. The tailors drove the merchants and the merchants drove the mills. Obviously, the decline in the bespoke tailoring industry has resulted in the mills looking elsewhere for revenue and competing for business with Italian mills means that costs had to be cut. Our cloth industry centred around Huddersfield, had/Has ancient machinery and couldn’t compete with the modern Italian, high tech mills and lots of them have disappeared. Fashions have dictated that fabrics are lighter in weight too, not necessarily the forte of the British cloth industry… These days a lot of Merchants sell Italian cloth on their books. Funnily enough, Italy now faces very stiff competition from the far East and the same thing that happened to our industry will happen there. Already China’s thirst for raw wool has pushed the price up across the rest of the world enormously over the last 5-10 years. More locally, the best merchants in London haven’t been able to afford the rents in the West End and have moved out and then the majority have been swallowed up by one company. This has meant that all these merchants now sell uniformly average quality. :frowning:

Fox are still good for flannel.
Standeven (shit name, used to be Halstead) make the best mohair.

Scabal produce some good quality fabrics with a mill called Bower Roebuck but their designs are mostly a bit flash for me. YMMV

Lesser, Harrison, Smith Woolens among others, are all now owned by Lear Browne and Dunsford (as discussed previously) and where there used to be a clear difference between these and other names quality wise, that is no longer the case. They used to have a clearly discernible personality too… Anyway, they are still good quality, they just don’t quite hit the highs they used to.

I’m well aware that I sound like a miserable old git but bear in mind that I’m obsessive and that I rarely reach my own standards! You can see why I’ll never be a millionaire…

:rofl::rofl:

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Forum tagline

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The exact answer I was hoping for!

Oh good, glad my ranting hasn’t put you off! Let me know if you need any more ‘help.’ :rofl:

As an owed (sic?) to you I am wearing one of my oldest suits today. This one’s probably 20 years old. Purchased from Aquascutum Regent St (before they went bankrupt and had to sell the building) in their winter sale. 92% wool and 8% cashmere.

Looks like 20 year old corn flakes have come out too

Ode?

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What is it these days?

cash converters