Made by Hand, Machine, or 3D?
Imagine a world in which restaurants could produce meals so cheaply that people didn’t bother to cook at home anymore. That people no longer owned refrigerators. Or ovens or stoves or even pots and pans. Where people no longer even knew how to cook. That’s a bit like the state of American manufacturing. We get everything from overseas. And then imagine something occurred to force all the restaurants to close. How would we eat? WeRead More
Got a sewing machine? Got a serger? We need your to help fight the virus! We just left a meeting with Rochester General Hospital about making our front line doctors and nurses face masks and hospital gowns. We can’t reopen the factory for safety reasons so we need home sewers – you! We’re in the process of sourcing raw materials, drafting contracts, and putting together our game plan. I’ve established a website to serve asRead More
From a 1937 booklet entitled “The Story of Vicuna, The World’s Finest Fabric” by Sylvan Stroock, president of S. Stroock & Company- “…Based on the present price of the cloth, men’s vicuna topcoats such as are made by The Hickey Freeman Co., (who make the world’s finest ready-made clothing) would sell at retail for $400.00 and overcoats made of Stroock heavy weight vicuna cloth would sell at $1,000.00” In today’s dollars, that overcoat would sellRead More
“Belly” and “roll” are terms used to describe the lapels on a jacket and there seems to be some confusion about what they mean. When we say a lapel has a belly to it, we mean there is a curve in the edge of the lapel as it approaches the button. The opposite would be a straight edge. There is a notion that some lapels are given a concave edge but this is just anRead More
I have some very sad news. Agreman Gimp is no longer. A friend reached out to see where I was buying my gimp these days. I had stocked up a while ago so hadn’t bought any in a while. I once did a group buy of gimp for people so since I figured I would reach out to Gutermann to buy some boxes and set up a little web store in the US to distributeRead More
The tl;dr versions- scroll down for an opportunity to buy tailored clothing made in Europe from your own personal pattern at a deeply discounted price. Oh, and help us out at the same time. It’s a widely-accepted belief that a bespoke suit must start with a unique pattern drafted from a customer’s individual measurements. The early twentieth century saw the proliferation of “scientific” drafting systems that bespoke cutters could use to interpret the body measurements. Read More
Wow. It’s been 12 years since I started this blog. The focus has shifted over time, and I seem to have been writing less and less, mostly since life happened and I got busy (and married) and moved all over the place. I feel the time is right to devote more time to blogging again, especially since I now have help. The first major thing to talk about is the migration from Blogspot/Blogger and Flickr,Read More
I’m stepping so far outside of my comfort zone these days…. I’m participating in a fashion show this week. It’s a major fundraiser here in Rochester and I thought I would present a small group of garments in memory of our late congresswoman, for whom I had promised to make a suit not long before her passing. At a special preview event I mentioned I had just received a dress form in US size 20Read More
More of the The Louise Collection by Robert Jeffery
I’ve been working on a capsule collection of ladies’ tailored clothing, inspired by our late Congresswoman, Louise Slaughter. Find out more about it here.
