Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve always made friend with the tailor. My friend pointed this out to me the other day when I mentioned I was coming from dropping of a dress at the tailors. Oh, I remember you used to do that in college, she said. Only then did I remember the dingy 2nd floor walkup on the Commons, where I would take clothes I bought of eBay to an old Italian man who was buried behind racks of garments that I didn’t know how he kept track of.
Then, when I moved to Brooklyn, there was the Caribbean man who operated out of a flat in an apartment building on Ocean Avenue, right across from the park. An interesting set up. He had an old Maltese who greeted me languidly when I entered, and he would always be playing a movie on his old box TV when I came in. I was struck by the harsh intimacy of the setting – not a storefront, but an apartment that I’d have to be buzzed into, lit with the intrusive glow of a fluorescent tube light. When I went into the bathroom, not a fitting room, to try on clothes to show him where I needed adjustments, I’d wonder if I needed to be more guarded, cautious around this strange man. Then, he’d instruct me to stand on a coffee table so I’d be visible on the propped up full-size mirror, and he would set to work pinning the hems and mentally assessing the work to be down, and I’d feel as though this was as normal a situation as any. Never a moment of discomfort in a tailor’s shop, which set a new standard for me of the way far less intimate interactions with strange men could be, on the subway for instance. I also appreciated that he would entertain all my requests and unusual garments, sometimes with a puzzled chuckle but never with judgement. When I moved across the park, I biked through the loping fields during the sweaty end of summer with a parcel of clothing in my back crate to deliver to him. He did such a good job at such a low price that the strenuous journey was almost worth it.
I am lazier than that though, so I resolved to find a new tailor within walking distance from me. Another Caribbean man with a confusing Google appointment-setting feature had a shop in an office building a few blocks from me. I was pleased to have found a good replacement for my garment adjusting needs, who did as excellent as a job. He was friendly and jovial, and once, when I bought a sewing machine that I could not figure out how to thread, I hauled the entire device to his shop, where he kindly showed me the (silly) mistake I was making, and even offered me spools of thread from his diverse collection to practice with. Hesitant to accept this gift at first, I remember reaching for a coral that was the same color as my couch. He seemed thrilled about my purchase, and encouraged me to come back with questions any time, saying, I can see you making all these kinds of things, gesturing to the dress he must have designed on a dress form in the corner. I laughed, hoping for the same, and secretly pleased that perhaps he could see within my meticulous tailoring requests the inspiration to construct my own original pieces. Unfortunately, though I managed to hem my jeans once, the sewing machine remains a relic in my closet and I keep going back to him for more complex needs. I do feel confident it will re-emerge when the time is right.
These are the stories of my neighborhood tailors. They made regretful purchases worth it, or more interesting, or allowed me to extend the life of an old garment. When my friend brought it up the other day, I was surprised, and somewhat tepidly conceded that I did indeed develop a rapport with tailors in all the places I’ve lived. (It’s one of the first things I seek out after settling somewhere!). I guess, I was surprised because it’s a part of my life I tend to hide, just like these tailors hidden behind racks and racks of clothing. It feels like such a frivolous endeavor, not only to have indulged myself in buying the clothes, but then indulging the item itself by taking it to be adjusted, altered, cared for in a way. Like taking an item of clothing to the spa. Do I fetishize material things that much? Certainly, I could have settled to wear most of these items without tailoring. But what is the fun in that? When someone compliments me on a dress I’m wearing, I won’t tell them the extra layer of work that went into redesigning to make it extra special with the help of a tailor. It just came to me like this, I would have them believe. I do not put thought into my appearance, I just appear.
When I bought a sewing machine during lockdown last year in an attempt to do these tailor services in-house, I became fascinated by pattern-making, the way garments were constructed from two-dimensional shapes. Taking a part the pieces of a simple item like a t-shirt, you’d never know that these shapes conformed into the final piece. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far in making clothes. It took me forever to learn how to thread the machine, my stitches always ended up tangled at the back. A bobbin issue, YouTube told me.
Before I bought one for myself, I actually sent my mom one for mother’s day, in that same way that our subconscious surreptitiously buys someone else the present we want for ourselves. She got farther than me in her craft, since she was relearning something she used to do when we were young when she would make dresses out of old lehengas, as well as all other sewing needs you somehow require when young. I remember many trips to Joann fabrics, and the shopkeepers unraveling bolts of printed flannels and cottons across the table. Once, she made a colonial era costume for me the night before Colonial Day in school. I churned butter in the multipurpose room surrounded by other girls who bought their costumes, looking perhaps more authentic because mine was crafted by hand weeks before like a real pioneer, except for the fact my ancestors were not settlers of an already inhabited land whose history continues to be overly-taught to grade school children in the form of historical reenactments.
Tailoring is about renewing and repurposing. Of course it is easy to see how well it wears the “beyond consumption” anti-capitalist critique; certainly it is better to mend and reuse garments than dispose of them and buy new ones. However, it also make me think of dialectics, the old becoming the new. The seed of the new is sowed in the state of the old. I never brought back home the exact same garment after I took it to the tailor. The dress I wanted hemmed to get rid of an unsalvageable tear in its silk-cotton fabric is now shorter than I was used to. The tear I wanted mended has a slightly visible patch now, since the color of thread can’t always be exactly matched. This perspective is a little more interesting to me than the beyond consumption discourse, because it offers a way to think about change, as an ascending spiral of progression, starting with where we are at now. We don’t mend and alter things to get them back to an original state. Rather, the original state transforms, again and again. Why hide the process?
TextileTBD 