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Made By Martin?

Posted by: Martin Stall on 16/05/2006

Of course I love my profession. It is a beautiful experience to create a thing of beauty. It is a delight to see a customer beaming with gladness at how his or her suit turned out. To hear the words “just what I wanted” is the ultimate job satisfaction I can have.

But another part of the pleasure of my work is not in the cutting or the dealing with customers, selecting fabrics or designing. What I thoroughly enjoy, and maybe even more so than anything else, is sitting at my sewing machine or on my table, and making my things myself. (Yes, I do, archaically, sit on my table for certain parts of the job, cross-legged and all. It isn’t required, but quite comfortable). Tailoring is my passion, cutting as well as making. But here we run into an economic problem.

Considering the fact that making a suit can take up to 80 hours of diligent concentrated work, a large percentage of which is done by hand, it is easy to see that if my business were centered only around suits that I personally make, the suits would be ridiculously expensive, I’d only be able to make twenty or so a year, and I’d soon be out of business and looking for a job. The downside of perfectionism, I suppose.

Therefore I, as does practically every other bespoke tailors in the world, I employ a small number of highly skilled professionals to do the actual making. Rest assured, there’s absolutely no loss of quality due to this. In fact, to be perfectly honest, some of my tailors deliver a more perfectly finished suit than I do. But I, as you may have gathered from reading these pages, am an artist, if you allow me the boldness to say so. This means that when I make a suit with my own hands, there slips in a certain intangible aspect of beauty. No one could point it out in a suit and say: “there, that’s it”, not even me. I know why this is: I deeply love my work, and I gave up everything for it. You should see the reactions I get from people when I make things myself- no better yet: Have me make one for you, and have the experience yourself.

Obviously, with most of my work centering around measuring and cutting, I have extremely limited time to make things myself. But I do love the work so much that I do on occasion make things myself. Regrettably, the prices are of course outrageous, and delivery time is no less than six months. But then, making suits myself is something I do more as a hobby, while cutting is my actual job.

That is why I can only offer this particular type of suit to a very select group of lovers of beauty. I make, at the most, five or six of these a year, and I invariably loose money on it, because once I get started, I just put more and more time and effort in it, to make it more beautiful, more refined. Because, Like Mondriaan said: Art has to be forgotten, beauty must be realised.

Technical note: despite the reference to Mondriaan, all parts of your suit will be in the right place. ;-)

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