The Return of The Tailor

My first memories of the tailor are being taken by my dadi, just before a wedding we had to go to in Bombay. I’m sure I’d been to a tailor before, but this visit left an inedible mark. Perhaps it was because it was the first wedding I was going to without my parents. Perhaps because it was a wedding where my cousin was marrying into the family of 90s superstar Kajol; and I was an excited, nine-year-old fan who’d get to meet her at it. But there were two things I distinctly remember about that visit. The first is being fitted for an elaborate lehenga against my will—and being inordinately grumpy about it, as a nine-year-old is wont to be. The second is the camaraderie my dadi had with the tailor.

“Chai lengey?” the kindly, khadi kurta-clad masterji had offered, moments into us sitting down on the wooden chairs of the shop. “Baby ke liye juice?” he beckoned at me with a smile and a wink. Baby immediately said ‘yes’ to juice—she deserved some compensation for the upcoming ordeal—while dadi graciously declined the chai. As my juice arrived in its little tetra pack covered with condensation droplets, my dadi and the tailor conversed. His children were well—Sonu was in eighth standard now, and Deepa was settling in well with her new husband in Meerut. My dadi told him about my dada’s recent health scare, how the lemon trees in the garden weren’t doing as well as last year, and how this wedding would be my first away from home.

“Oh, tab toh kuch bahut hi special banaengey Baby ke liye,” he ruffled my hair. And in a flash, out came rolls of fabric. They were held up against my skin for contrast. Measurements were swiftly taken as I grumbled inwardly (and outwardly) about being shuffled about by the tailor’s assistants. Soon, a style, fabric and embellishments were chosen. We waved the man goodbye, and I didn’t think about him much when my lehenga arrived; shiny, pastel pink, and almost perfectly fitted except for a slightly tight arm—a very possible consequence of my constant movement. I didn’t really think about him at all, until this very instance, writing this column.

A combination of my hating shopping and growing up in the 2000s (and only really gaining purchasing power in the 2010s) meant developing a penchant for online shopping. It also meant I never had reason to explore the very Indian relationship shoppers have with tailors—I also didn’t quite notice the way it died out in favour of fast fashion. But it was one that celebrity stylist Divyak D’ Zouza observed closely all his life. “I think every Indian family has that one tailor that knows what the mum or dad wears, stitches the kids’ uniforms. It’s such a big part of our culture.”

But, he mentions, coming into a degree of privilege where we start buying from designer boutiques or luxury brands, people tend to forget that there is still a tailor cutting and making these clothes for them. “Which is why the idea of being directly connected to the craftsman is so important, especially for me as someone who works in fashion.” D’Souza also brings a key fact people can gloss over—how tailoring in India provides a quality of service you’d pay several times more for anywhere else. “Think of Saville Row or the Japanese jean-makers and how expensive that premium service is. But here, you’d pay a fraction of the cost—often unfairly so—for a very high-quality bespoke service.”

It’s definitely cyclical. After years of convenience and variety being the priority—the two greatest factors that led to the advent of the fast fashion retailer—things are changing. While not universal, there is a return—albeit gradual—to slow, deliberate consumption of clothing. On the one hand are indie brands, or sustainable clothing labels that tick all the right environmental boxes—but charge accordingly for it. And on the other hand, there is the tailor. Sure, it involves a degree of personal involvement—from a visit to the physical shop, to the choosing of fabrics and providing references or instructions. But the end result is customised clothing that, as D’Souza points out, is only a sliver of what it would cost outside the country. And customisation means customisation.

“One of the best things about working with tailors—especially seasoned masterjis—is their incredible patience,” say designers Rimple and Harpreet Narula “We’ve seen it firsthand, and can absolutely vouch for it. They rarely say no, no matter how intricate or unusual the request. There’s a quiet dedication in the way they bring a client’s vision to life, helping someone live out their own little fashion fantasy, stitch by stitch. The attention to detail, the personal connection, and the way they mould a garment around an individual’s body and personality; it’s an emotional kind of craftsmanship.”

I feel like the conversation is not incomplete without a conversation with an actual tailor—so I go to the one I know best; KS Tailors, in Green Park Market, down the road from my house. I’m not a tailor’s target audience—I’m lazy about shopping, and I prefer to do it online, from the comfort of my home. But I’ve gone to him with clothes in need of rescuing—a dress I would wear if it had some interesting detail to it, or a hemline I’d like shortened–asymmetrically. I give him clothes I would otherwise part with to customise so they can be wearable again, and so far, he’s always done a bang-up job—a couple of hundred bucks and a dud skirt is cute again, or an ill-fitting blazer now hangs right.

Does he get a lot of those requests, I wonder aloud. “Oh yes,” Masterji Kulvinder Singh tells me. “Especially from girls like you,” he smiles. To him, I’m essentially 18, and I take the compliment instead of pushing back. “People will want skirts shortened, necklines deepened; some even give me jeans they want to make cuts in,” he laughs. One thing he gets a fair amount of these days is requests for old saris to be converted into dresses, co-ord sets, or pre-draped saris. “They’re too old-fashioned for you all, you see,” he chuckles with more amusement than judgment. A lot of his customers are also not conventional sizes; often, pear or apple-shaped, uncomfortable in the standard size-chart clothes that most brands make. “It doesn’t fit them properly—some part of the dress or pants will be too loose or too tight and they find it looks strange.” Enter; tailor-made fits.

“Indian women aren’t built for the one-size-fits-all category,” say the Narulas. “Our bodies are diverse, our proportions are unique, and that’s exactly where the brilliance of a good tailor comes in. They understand the Indian silhouette in a way no ready-made garment ever can. It’s that understanding, that sensitivity to fit, form, and individuality, that makes tailored clothing feel not just comfortable, but empowering.”

For D’Szouza, having gone from a much larger frame to essentially a sample size (“not bragging” he grins), trousers off the rack just wouldn’t cut it for most of his life. “Now, even at this size, I’m still in the habit of wearing high-waisted trousers; I think they work well for my frame, and that they’re from another time versus ‘trendy’. That makes them hard to come by—unless you go to a designer and have them custom-made. But for me, as a stylist, I have access to these great tailors, I have an understanding of fabrics, of seasons and styles, so I work with my masterji about pleats, length, where it should sit on the waist—I’m a bit of a nerd about these things. But every pair of trousers I wear has been tailor-made.”

In my own observation, the return to the tailor is the juxtaposition of three key things for the mindful Indian shopper. The first is the conscious shift away from the homogeneity of fast fashion, the idea of a hundred other people owning exactly the same Zara trench coat or H&M pleated skirt. The second is an actual understanding of the waste behind the fast fashion market, and wanting not to contribute to that anymore. The last is the shift toward customisation and fit—the idea of having imaginations brought to life and to have them fit exactly; without paying exorbitant rates for that bespoke tailoring. For the individual with a keen fashion sense and a genuine desire to move away from the waste and uniformity of fast fashion without paying the premium for it that indie brands would invariably demand, the tailor is the perfect crossover. That, and the cup of catch-up chai, of course.

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