Until the 60’s, when the big fish started eating the small fish, there were small mills that would weave small yardages. We dealt with a Scottish firm by the name of Thomas Addie & Son- they made the finest hand loomed Shetland in the world. If a customer came in and wanted us to match the cloth from which we had tailored his favorite 20 year old sports jacket, we could send a small swatch of the cloth to Thomas and they would weave 10 yards of hand loomed Shetland for us. (The Thomas we were dealing with in 1960 was the son of the original Thomas Addie. He was a contemporary of my father. Thomas had a son who was my contemporary. He went out onto an oil rig. Thomas Addie & Son is no more.) Today the minimum yardage one can get woven is whole “pieces” of cloth, not yards of cloth. As a practical matter one can only order what the mills put into their “collections.”

We created what we called “projects” as a way to offer our customers unusual patterns that were not part of any mills offerings. We cajoled one of our suppliers into weaving a sample length of a pattern we chose. We used cashmere. As customers visited, we would show them the sample. When we got twenty orders, we would have a piece of the cashmere woven. It would usually take 6 to 9 months to sell the twenty jackets. Because we were ordering a piece of cloth, we would get a special price which would allow us to make the jackets at a special price. One of the first “projects” we offered was the Picasso Plaid. The pattern was very colorful. Pablo Picasso did not design the pattern, but he did have his tailor make him a jacket from the cloth. His French tailor ordered the cloth from W.Bill. When he ordered the cloth he told Geoffrey Bill that he needed the cloth rushed to him because it was for Pablo Picasso. From that point in time W.Bill called the pattern “The Picasso Plaid”.

If you are in the neighborhood you can see the “Picasso Plaid”- I don’t have any to sell, but I have a remnant. I also have 5 small bolts of Thomas Addie & Son hand loomed Shetland. While those cloths last a few jackets and/or bush coats can be made.

Mortimer Levitt, who was the founder and owner of The Custom Shop Shirtmakers, was a Chipp customer. Glen Bernbaum, who ran the chain for Mr. Levitt, was also a Chipp customer. (Mr. Bernbaum went into the restaurant business after leaving the shirt business; he created a very successful restaurant in NYC called “Mortimers”, which was named after Mortimer Levitt.)

My father and Mr. Levitt would sit for hours and talk about the business. Listening to these pros was an education. Mr. Levitt was a brilliant marketer, something that started with the name he chose: The Custom Shop. In fact, they did not make anything custom. He told me that, according to his definition, if the customer chooses the cloth and specifies the details—and then if he takes the measurements, it is custom. By this logic, everything they made was custom.

He felt that selling was like acting. You didn’t have to know that much about the product if you could follow a script. To that end he wrote a script covering all the products being sold by The Custom Shop and required his salesmen to memorize it. Mr. Levitt sold the chain in the mid 1990’s (as I recall, around 1997). Through the years I had many customers ask me if I thought buying custom shirts from The Custom Shop was worth it. My answer has always been that the definition of a good value is if you are pleased with the product you received for the money you spent. It doesn’t really matter that what Mr. Levitt would call custom I would not.

My father had a sign over his desk that said something like the following: If you pay too much money for something, all you’ve simply spent a little extra money. But if you don’t pay enough for something, and you end up with a product that doesn’t do what you want it to do, you have wasted all the money you spent.

We have had customers who were very short and customers who were very tall.  But none taller than Wilt Chamberlain.

Wilt “the  stilt” was engaged to appear in a shoe commercial. The commercial was to have men in business suits playing basketball. The tag line was that the shoes were so comfortable that one could play basketball while wearing them.  The 10 men appearing in the commercial were all retired NBA players.  Mr. Chamberlain was the featured star and Chipp was hired to make him a custom suit.

It was of course impossible for Wilt to be unobtrusive anywhere he went, but, still, he was very pleasant at every step in the project.  Not taken with himself in the least. (Through the years we had customers who had reputations within their fields as being very tough; but they were never difficult in our shop. We were their pleasure.)  Our fitter had to stand on a chair to take his measurement and to do the fittings. Before the final fitting our designer tried the jacket on to check the balance.  The jacket reached his ankles.

At the final fitting Mr. Chamberlain stood in the middle of the shop and tried all his basketball moves while wearing the suit. He told us how comfortable the suit was. Unfortunately the shoe company did not do as good a job making the shoes as we did with the suit;  we were told that when they went to shoot the commercial he couldn’t fit into them.

I still laugh when I close my eyes and picture him slightly bent at the waist with his arms spread standing next to our fitter who looked like a Lilliputian. I do not remember the name of the shoe company.

All made-to-measure is not the same. Because the sewing of a made-to-measure garment is no different than the sewing that the producer of the made-to-measure would use in making a standard garment—a 40-Regular, for example—it can only be as good as the factory that makes it.

There will be a significant difference in a garment made by Oxford and one made by a factory in Poland. Assuming that you are using the same cloth and a similar quality “make,” there are additional factors that affect how close you get the ball to the pin. The less hands in the process the better the final result.

Remember the childhood game Telephone? The kids are sitting in a line. A message is whispered into the ear of the first child, it is passed along, and by the time it has reached the end of the line it is usually quite different. So it is In most MTM operations: a fitter takes measurements,  measurements are sent to the factory, someone else then applies the measurements to a pattern and makes adjustments, yet another person cuts the cloth—and then, finally, it is put into the production line to be made into a garment.

At Winston Tailors, the man who takes your measurements is the man who makes the pattern and then cuts the garment. He has a feel for who you are. Is a forty chest 20″ in the front and 20″ in the back, or is it 21″ in the front and 19″ in the back? Etc.  Although I have said in a previous blog post that even in the hands of a skilled tailor the art is still only a sophisticated form of trial and error, there is still nothing that can replace a skilled tailor.

We have all our garments completed by our producer with no buttonholes. This gives us the ability to make any adjustments that may be necessary and the individual customer can get the button holes exactly where he chooses. We then make the button holes by hand. It is the rare garment that doesn’t need some adjustment, but the results will always be better in a small shop where the alterations are directly supervised by the fitter. The same piece of cloth will be turned into a very different suit depending on who makes it.

Because of advertising the consumer has been exposed to terms like Super 100’s, Super 120’s, Super 150’s—and now Super 180’s. Classic one up-manship. If you have Super 100’s, I’ll do you one better.

What does “Super Whatever” cloth mean, and is all this cloth the same?  To start down the road of understanding you must first understand what cloth is. It all starts with the raw wool.  The wool goes to a spinner, who turns it into something that can be woven into cloth. The cloth must then be finished. Each one of these steps is important.

The wool at auction is divided into qualities. The finer the wool—which is determined by a measurement of the diameter of the strand—the higher the quality number.  This means that there would be more strands in an inch of cloth woven from Super 100’s than in an inch of cloth woven from Super 80’s. It’s not 100 strands versus 80 strands, but that’s the idea.

Still, not all Super 100’s cloths are the same.  To say your fabric is Super 100’s,  you must have fabric that is made from Super 100’s-quality wool.  But if you take the  Super 100’s wool and use a poor spinner, a poor weaver, and then finish the cloth poorly, you will have poor quality cloth that you can still say is “Super 100’s”.

Not all advertising, but certainly some advertising, is geared to what you can say that is not a false statement but that will allow people to assume something that is not the case. Buyer beware!

Winston Tailors makes two products: bespoke custom clothing and made-to measure clothing. Because we individually cut all the clothing we make, there is often little difference between these two products.  After the cloth has been cut we are at a fork in the road—we can make it in our own workroom, the entire garment made by an individual tailor (bespoke), or we can send it to our made-to-measure maker, who has a production line.

The difference is in the sewing and the canvas that is used. (All of our clothing is made with canvas. ) The sewing in made-to-measure garments is the same as is used in ready-made “rack” clothing, even though there are variations in the cutting. As for a bespoke garment, there is a difference in the softness of the construction, so, even if an individual is a perfect size 40R, there would be a different feel to a bespoke garment cut to that pattern.

Who needs custom bespoke clothing?” The answer is very few individuals. Some individuals have body anomalies that require custom clothing, but we can fit the great majority of men with the way we make made-to-measure clothing.