My last piece, which mentioned the $43,000 suit, has caused a few waves on my usually tranquil sea.  As a follow-up I could not resist sharing the following story.  In the old Chipp shop, when we owned the building at 14 East 44th St, we had a large cloth inventory.  When customers were selecting cloth for either bespoke or made-to-measure clothing they were shown bolts of cloth, not swatch books. Back in those days the finest English cloth would cost us between $35 - $45 a yard.  Today we show customers swatches in the sample books that the mills and cloth merchants give us.  Most of the cloth we use costs us $100 - $250  per yard.  We can no longer afford to stock cloth.  Among our customers was an individual who was one of the wealthiest individuals in the USA. He would only select cloth that was the opening price. Because I knew that, I would only show him “opening range” cloth.  One day he came into the shop and I was assisting another customer.  While waiting for me to finish with the other customer, he went to the “wall of cloth” and selected 3 cloths.  When I finished with the first customer I went to assist him. I told him that two of the cloths he selected were the opening range but that the third cloth was more costly and that suit would cost $50 more than the other two suits. He said, ” I will make another selection”- which he did.  So one of the wealthiest men in the USA denied himself something he liked for what I think would have been like my denying myself something for half a cent.  I always respected his position. He had a line in the sand he would not cross. I don’t think of any of our customers as being conspicuous consumers.

At Winston Tailors and in our previous incarnation as Chipp of NY, Inc., I always took and still do take pride  in the clothing we make and the price at which we sell the fruit of our labor.  Not to say our clothing is inexpensive.  One can certainly buy clothing for less than what we charge.  But you would be hard pressed to spend less and get what we produce- a blending of superior cloth and individually cut garments cut over a pattern we create for each individual. To put our prices into perspective I suggest you read the article that appeared in the weekend edition of “The Wall Street Journal”- January 24-25, 2009.  The article leads with the most recent range of suits being produced by Brioni. The suits are priced at $43,000. ( They do  not say if alterations are included.)  Another shop, Qiviuk ( “Q” not followed by “U”- it is spelled that way twice in the article) carries suits at $20,000. Brioni says they have sold 30 of the $43,000 suits. I doubt that any of the purchasers were my customers.  I am envious- especially in these hard economic times !

On January the 16th Andrew Wyeth passed on  to the next realm.  I never met and our firm never made any clothing for Andrew Wyeth. We did make a lot of corduroys for Jamie Wyeth. Although I rarely relate stories about customers when they are still on our earth, I make an exception here because Jamie did something for me that had nothing to do with our clothing business.                                                                                  Jamie’s mother wrote a book titled “The Stray”.  In anticipation of Jamie’s arrival to fit his corduroys, I bought 8 copies of the book. After his fittings I asked him to sign the books- 1 for each of my 3 kids, 1 for my wife, and 4 that I wanted to hold and give as gifts when I was so moved. I would have been happy if he had written”Best wishes” and signed it.  Jamie sat down at the table located near our 2nd floor windows and drew a pig on the title page of each book. It took him about 1/2 hour. When one of our children’s schools held a fund raiser I would donate one of the books.  Spirited bidding would occur for a book with an original Jamie Wyeth pen drawing on the title page.  Another example of how fortunate we were,and still are, to deal with customers  who rank at the top of the class meter !