A Day in Dallas

Yesterday, I flew up to Dallas to see Chris Despos for a fitting of the jacket I'm having made up from that length of Breanish tweed that I wrote about last month. These little trips are usually quite enjoyable (well, aside from the part involving airports or airplanes): I fly up in the morning, have lunch with Chris (who has excellent taste in restaurants) -- yesterday, we were joined by another of Chris's clients, a pediatric neurosurgeon with a thing for clothes -- have the fitting, chat with Chris, flip through some swatches, fly back home in time for dinner. Yesterday was no exception to the pattern.

Chris has been an independent tailor for over 20 years. He originally came to Dallas in 1981 to work for a tailor who trained at Caraceni in Milan and was brought over to the United States to be Neiman Marcus's head fitter before striking out on his own. A few years later, Chris, too, struck out on his own. He relocated to Chicago several years ago; but because of the size of his clientèle in Dallas (and the fact that most of his tailors are located in Dallas), he still keeps an apartment in Big D and comes down every few weeks for two or three days.

I first heard about Chris in Alan Flusser's book Style and the Man, in which he was one of the few US-based tailors mentioned. I heard his name again when I was considering what to do with another length of Breanish tweed I purchased last fall. When I had originally ordered it (or, rather, when I subscribed to an order that my friend arranged), I had thought that I would have Oxxford Clothes make it up as a made-to-measure jacket. Oxxford's quality of make is second to none, and they do CMT (cut, make, trim -- ie, they'll make up a customer's own cloth, not force the customer to pick from their swatches) for a very reasonable price. Unfortunately, by the time I took delivery of my tweed, I realized that Oxxford was not a good option. I had given them a length of alpaca to make up into a jacket, and the result was a disaster. It was a shapeless mess that made me look like a linebacker weighing 50 pounds more than I weigh. I'm not a little guy, and adding 50 pounds to me is not a good thing. I mentioned the problem to one of my friends who knows about as much as anybody not in the business knows about bespoke tailoring, and he said, "Well, there's Despos. If you go with him, I guarantee that you'll get something that fits." That's a pretty strong recommendation, so I gave Chris a call, discussed the fabric and his approach with him, and decided that I would go with him. I'm glad that I did. He is extremely talented, and the jacket that I got fits perfectly and looks very good. More than that, it doesn't feel like it's there when I'm wearing it. Every other piece of tailored clothing that I have ever worn has really felt like it's wearing me. This jacket doesn't. Combined with the fact that Chris is a nice guy with good taste in restaurants, and the experience was darn near perfect. I have since ordered several pairs of trousers from him, and if anything, they are even more miraculous than the jacket. They actually fit, which is something that I haven't managed with any ready-to-wear or made-to-measure trousers, and they look good. When I ordered this second length of Breanish tweed, I knew that it would go to Chris.

Different tailors have different processes, but Chris likes to do basted fittings for his jackets. The pieces of the jacket have been cut, and they're loosely stitched together with white cotton thread. He does this so that if there are any problems, he can easily disassemble the jacket and pin it in the correct configuration while the client is still there. If you look closely at the picture above, you'll see that the left sleeve is missing. This is because the back-front balance was slightly off (the back of the jacket was lower than the front, meaning that the bottom was not perfectly parallel to the ground): Chris tore off the sleeve and the collar, sliced the stitching attaching the back panel to the front panel with a razor blade, and repinned the two pieces together correctly. It's an impressive bit of theater, and it serves a useful purpose. Another impressive thing about the jacket, even in this incomplete state: it hung nearly closed at the front, even without being pinned. That's a sign that the side-side balance of the jacket is good, and it's something that Chris prides himself for. The jacket should be finished in mid-October, and it will hopefully be cool enough to wear it then. I also selected a fabric for some trousers to go with the jacket: a Scabal 450 gram whipcord in a brown-gray-blue melange. Those should be done in November or December.

The Meaning of Bespoke

Every so often, a newspaper or magazine that caters to those who have a not insubstantial disposable income will run an article that fits into the "Gee, aren't bespoke suits neat?" genre. This month, that periodical is New York magazine, and the article is "Me, My Suit, and I" by Michael Idov. An indispensable part of this type of article is the rundown of the Cool Details that you can get in a bespoke suit:

The remaining two categories—the rich and the wannabes—often simply replace label worship with tailor worship: in the Lehman Brothers hallways, Henry Poole must get name-dropped more often than Ben Bernanke. For this type of buyer, there are some easy signifiers of bespokeness, what Tom Wolfe calls “status details.” The most famous one is working cuff holes. On most off-the-rack suits, that row of buttons on your cuff is simply sewn on, because this way you can move them up or down during alterations; once you’ve cut the buttonholes, you can’t make the sleeve shorter or longer without screwing up the look. Another area of obsession is the stitching. On the front buttonholes and the flower loop, it shouldn’t be too even; on the lapels, staggered “pick stitching” is a big plus. When laymen claim they can smell bespoke from a mile away, most tend to mean these little signatures. But focusing on flourishes betrays the big idea. That idea is that you can ask for anything—40 pockets, a sewn-in gun holster, a third leg—and, to a certain type of person, anything else is tyranny of the designer.

Surprisingly enough, Idov doesn't mentioned the ne plus ultra of status details that are used to sell "bespoke" suits: wild lining. You can get purple polka-dotted lining if you want to! Isn't that cool? Of course, nowadays, you can get working buttonholes and pick stitching on any number of down-market off-the-rack suits; and any manufacturer with a stock special or made-to-measure program worth its salt will offer a plethora of wild and crazy linings. Moving past the Cool Details, Idov moves on to the definition of bespoke:

Intrigued, I take a quick survey of top tailors with one dumb-sounding question: What is bespoke? Considering the marketing power of the word, it is perhaps inevitable that its meaning should depend on who’s talking. Olga Fioravanti offers the most cut-and-dried, if slightly reductive, definition: “A real bespoke tailor belongs to the Custom Tailors and Designers Association of America”—of which her husband is, incidentally, the president.

He then moves on to some obfuscation from a representative of Duncan Quinn and then a more intelligible definition from a guy who writes for the Oxford English Dictionary.

This is really not that difficult. To me, there are really two components. First and foremost, bespoke means what the client wants it to mean. If I want my tweed jacket with turnback cuffs, a throat latch and flapped patch pockets with billows, I should be able to get it. Angled hacking pockets and a half belt in back? No problem. If it's technically possible, the tailor should gladly make it. Now, he may think that what I want is a bad idea, and it's his responsibility to tell me so and explain why. But ultimately, it's my decision (and he can decline the commission if it offends him). If I'm confronted with a handful of models and can't alter them in a meaningful way, it's not bespoke. If I can't change the number and configuration of any pocket on the jacket, internal or external, it's not bespoke. And so on. Second is the method of construction. Bespoke garments are cut one at a time from a paper pattern individually created for a particular client. Period. This is not to say that tailors won't have various standard proportions (ie, if this measurement is this, then the length of this seam is that); the best will because it allows them to get the pattern right with less trial and error. However, if the tailor is altering a standard pattern, if every single seam length and measurement isn't up for grabs, then it's not bespoke.

It recent years, there has been a good deal of obfuscation about bespoke, and most of it has come from designers and their ad men who want to reap higher margins from glorified stock specials. Gucci? Tom Ford? Duncan Quinn? Not bespoke, no matter what their ad copy and slick salesmen say and how much free champagne they pour down your throat. Vincent Nicolosi? Chris Despos? Henry Poole? Bespoke, no matter how bad and threadbare their decor might be. As these sort of articles go, Idov's isn't that bad (although I don't much care for the trousers of the suit he got). It just is incomplete and doesn't really get to the heart of the matter.

By the way, the picture above is of a fitting that Will from A Suitable Wardrobe had with Thomas Mahon, a British tailor formerly a cutter with Anderson & Sheppard and Steed. Mahon, like most A&S alumni, does forward fittings, where the jacket is mostly made. This is significantly less dramatic than a basted fitting, where the pieces of the jacket are loosely stitched together with white thread. By the end of a basted fitting, the arms are likely to be torn off the body, the collar removed, and the back and front panels disassembled and pinned together again in a slightly different configuration. It's highly entertaining.