The tailor who ruins the trousers

I bought a few pairs recently from a shop I rate. The cloth is good, the construction honest, the finish clean, and they drape the way a trouser should. Somebody in that chain knew what they were doing and cared enough to do it properly. You can feel it the moment you put them on.

Better than fine. The trouble starts the second anything needs altering.

The maker builds with care. Then it goes to the bench and comes back like a potato sack that has been taken in❧No offence to potato sacks. At least they get handled honestly. . Fast, rough, no interest in how the thing was put together.

Same brand. Same name over the door. Completely different attitude.

Part of it is structural. The trousers are made centrally, by people set up to do that and nothing else. The alterations are local, different hands in every shop, some of it sent out to tailors who do not work for the company at all. The hands that built the garment and the hands that adjust it may never have met.

That explains it. It does not excuse it. When I carry a trouser back to the shop that made it, I expect the standard that made it. You do not get to be excellent at one half and wash your hands of the other.

The cloth was already excellent. The only thing missing was ten minutes of attention.

So skip the in-house service, find an independent, pay extra. That is exactly what I assumed.

There is a tailor in Mayfair, in a basement, the sort of address that is meant to mean something. Eighty pounds a trouser to take in a waist. I handed over three pairs and paid up front, because a price like that surely buys steady hands.

It was some of the worst work I have seen. Not rushed. Not a difference of taste. Poor.

I do not live a lavish life. Eighty pounds is real money to me, and I paid it believing I was buying care. What I bought was speed in a good postcode❧The postcode was doing all the work. I checked. .

I no longer think this is bad luck. We are short of alterations tailors who were trained properly and still care.

We talk endlessly about craft at the making end. The mills, the cloth, the cutters. Altering a garment is its own trade, and nobody champions it or trains for it. It is a cost to keep down, a job for anyone who owns a machine. The people who could do it beautifully are getting older and leaving, and the bench behind them is thin.

So the trousers are better and cheaper than they have ever been, while the skill to make one fit a real body gets harder to find every year. We learned to make things well at scale, then quietly let the finishing go.

An alteration is not damage control. It is the last step of building the trouser.

Until that is said out loud, I will keep buying good ones and bracing myself for the bench. The hardest part of owning something well made is not paying for it.

It is finding somebody who will not ruin it.