The second life of vintage tailoring

A tailor who has spent twenty years altering mid-century suiting explains what the old garments get right, and why so much of it cannot be reproduced at current prices.

Open up a jacket made in 1958 and the difference is structural. Horsehair canvas, floating rather than fused, hand-padded through the lapel roll. It takes hours, it cannot be automated, and it is the reason a sixty-year-old jacket still holds its shape while a fused garment from last season has already bubbled at the front edge. Our guest is unsentimental about the rest of it. The fabrics were often heavier than anyone wants now, the fit conventions were unforgiving, and a great deal of what survives in vintage shops survived precisely because nobody wanted to wear it. Survivorship makes the past look better than it was. What interests him is the alteration work. A well-made jacket carries enough inlay in the seams to be recut substantially, which means a garment can be adapted to a new wearer two or three times across its life.

We get into the economics, which are difficult. A full canvas jacket made properly in Europe cannot be sold cheaply, and the customers willing to pay are a small and ageing group. Several of the workshops that trained our guest have closed in the last decade, taking their apprenticeships with them. There is a more optimistic thread about where the skills are going. Alteration and repair work is growing even as new commissions shrink, and it turns out to be a viable route into the trade for people who could never have afforded a traditional apprenticeship. His advice for buying vintage is specific and worth writing down: check the shoulders first, since they cannot be meaningfully altered, then the inlay at the centre back seam. Almost everything else is negotiable.