Marek Sandoval

Marek Sandoval is Tailoring Editor at Ruvyne, writing from Lisbon on construction, alteration and the economics of the coat trade. He spent twenty years at the bench before he spent any of it at a desk, most of them altering mid-century suiting. He is more interested in what a garment can be made to do next than in what it looked like when new.

Sandoval trained under a coatmaker in a workroom that took in remakes, and learned the trade in the least glamorous part of it: opening other people's work to find out how it had been put together. Twenty years of that produces a particular kind of knowledge. He can tell within a few seconds of handling a lapel whether the front is canvassed or glued, and he has a low tolerance for the vocabulary the industry uses to obscure the difference. He began writing because the alterations he was asked to perform were becoming impossible. Garments arrived with nothing inside them: seams trimmed to a centimetre, hems shallow, fronts fused so that pressing changed nothing. The customers had paid considerable sums and had no idea that they had bought something that could not be adjusted. That gap, between what a garment costs and what it can be made to do, is the subject he has followed ever since. At Ruvyne he writes on tailoring, repair and the survival of the trade, including the workshops in Lisbon and elsewhere that still keep a pressing table and a hand stitcher on the payroll. He is sceptical of heritage as a marketing register and sympathetic to it as a working practice. He still takes in alterations for a handful of clients, on the grounds that a writer who stops sewing stops being able to check anything.