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Help newbie judge good tailoring

post #1 of 27
12/18/10 at 7:50am
Thread Starter 
Hello, all

Today my wife and I visited a Hong Kong tailor, shopping for a blazer. He showed me a sample, which eventually caused us to leave without ordering anything. Please tell me if my judgement was correct:

  • The button holes looked irregular. I understand that hand sewn button holes will not have the perfect regularity of machine sewn, but these looked somewhat sloppy and irregular to my eye.
  • The hand stitching around the edges of the lapels was causing a small amount of dimpling in the fabric. These were final stitches, not temporary ones.
Did I make the right call by leaving? I was wearing a rack-bought blazer, which had perfectly flat stitching along the lapels. And although it did not have button holes on the sleeves (just buttons), it looked better to my eye than the custom blazer with irregular button holes on the sleeves and front.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks.
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post #2 of 27
12/18/10 at 9:26am
Quote:
Originally Posted by davemill View Post
Hello, all

Today my wife and I visited a Hong Kong tailor, shopping for a blazer. He showed me a sample, which eventually caused us to leave without ordering anything. Please tell me if my judgement was correct:

  • The button holes looked irregular. I understand that hand sewn button holes will not have the perfect regularity of machine sewn, but these looked somewhat sloppy and irregular to my eye.
  • The hand stitching around the edges of the lapels was causing a small amount of dimpling in the fabric. These were final stitches, not temporary ones.
Did I make the right call by leaving? I was wearing a rack-bought blazer, which had perfectly flat stitching along the lapels. And although it did not have button holes on the sleeves (just buttons), it looked better to my eye than the custom blazer with irregular button holes on the sleeves and front.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks.

yes
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post #3 of 27
12/18/10 at 9:28am
What tailor was it and how much did he want?
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post #4 of 27
12/18/10 at 10:19am
There are many tailors in HK the vast majority of whom are crap or worse. Which one was this?

Try Chan on Nathan, Yao in the Royal Garden Hotel (Kowloon-side on Mody Road) or Y William Yu just down Mody Road.
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post #5 of 27
12/18/10 at 3:42pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by alliswell View Post
What tailor was it and how much did he want?
It was Hira's Fashion, http://www.hiras.com. Start price US$299 for blazer, $399 suit. I didn't get into actual pricing.
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post #6 of 27
11/9/11 at 4:55am

 

Hi,  My name is Juliet Lacoste,
 
I'm the official spokeswoman for Hiras Fashion Hong Kong.  I am very sorry to hear about your unfortunate incident. However, i'd like to point out that our company does not have a shop in Hong Kong so it would not have been possible for us to show you the blazer. Perhaps you had accidentally mistaken another tailor for ours.  
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post #7 of 27
11/9/11 at 5:01am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Juliet View Post


Hi,  My name is Juliet Lacoste,
 
I'm the official spokeswoman for Hiras Fashion Hong Kong.  I am very sorry to hear about your unfortunate incident. However, i'd like to point out that our company does not have a shop in Hong Kong so it would not have been possible for us to show you the blazer. Perhaps you had accidentally mistaken another tailor for ours.  


400
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post #8 of 27
11/9/11 at 7:27am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Juliet View Post


Hi,  My name is Juliet Lacoste,
 
I'm the official spokeswoman for Hiras Fashion Hong Kong.  I am very sorry to hear about your unfortunate incident. However, i'd like to point out that our company does not have a shop in Hong Kong so it would not have been possible for us to show you the blazer. Perhaps you had accidentally mistaken another tailor for ours.  
Quote:
Originally Posted by idfnl View Post

400

I was going to agree with this, but then I realized that Juliet's post is 1 year after the original.
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post #9 of 27
11/9/11 at 9:42am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Juliet View Post


"Hi,  My name is Juliet Lacoste,
 
I'm the official spokeswoman for Hiras Fashion Hong Kong."


I was referring to the name, not the location. I met them in a hotel in San Jose, CA.
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post #10 of 27
11/9/11 at 9:56pm

Thank you for clarifying that.

However our fitters do not carry any sample garments with them. We carry over 3000 sample swatches for suits, and 1000 fabrics for shirts. Frankly our fitters carry over 100 kilograms of fabric samples, and often travel between cities every 2-3 days when on a tour.

The only garments out fitters have to show are their own personal traveling wardrobe.

As a standard our fitters are kitted out with only suits, shirts, ties, dress shoes and accessories. You will never see one of our fitters attending to a client in a blazer, even on a Sunday. Again, as mentioned earlier we do not carry any sample garments with us.

I'd also like to note that our sleeves and the hand stitching are immaculately finished. As the only garments carried are our own salesman's personally worn suits, I am doubtful you would find these in any way imperfect.

We invite you to come and see us again to show your one of our suits (which of course will be our fitter's personal suit) at our next trip to San Jose, or San Francisco. We are in fact back in town in the next weeks to clarify this matter.

We do as well appreciate that you have taken the time and effort to sign up for a styleforum account for the sole purpose of passing your opinion on our products.
 

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post #11 of 27
11/9/11 at 11:03pm

Hi, I've visited the Hiras shop early this year and fitted out by Ramish. I am wearing one of their suits right now. Fits great, feels great, and I cannot find anything wrong with the finishing. The buttons are real buttons on the sleeve, so they will move, but nothing excessive. Also the hand stitching is a nice touch. I guess the less experienced might take this the wrong way and prefer machine stitching, but I love it.

 

My experience was perfect, however a friend of mine tried them out, and he had some alterations the first time, so took him a bit longer, the first jacket was too big, but they took care and its perfect now. I saw his suit, and really, the buttons and hand stitching did not stand out in a bad way, and looked fine. I would have noticed. He is happy as well now.

 

Are you sure you went to Hiras? I don't recall seeing any samples hanging around thinking back.

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post #12 of 27
11/10/11 at 1:07am
Here's a cool article pertaining to canvasing: http://www.styleforum.net/a/the-difference-between-fused-and-canvassed-suits-explained

Maybe it can help you better judge suits jackets? A bit off-topic, but fun to read, anyway. ^^
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post #13 of 27
11/10/11 at 1:33am

I am new to this forum, but here is what I see. I am not personally familiar with either party, neither hira tailors or davemil, The poster Davemill appears to have signed up simply to say something negative about Hiras. Let me elaborate, Davemil signed up in December 2010, and made post 2 posts, which were both consistently negative things about this company, and then disappears into thin air, and never says anything ever again. Along come the hira tailors who belatedly discovered the internet and found this forum, and likely felt horror when they noticed something negative written about them. So their PR department spins a reply to put davemil’s observation to rest. However davemil comes back from the dead just to paste a rebuttal within what…. 5 hours after a year absence…!? Dave, Where have you been for this long?


To me it seems davemil is likely a hiras competitor trying to spoil their name. davemil, this is not cool! I really don’t think you are a genuine person (and I mean that in both sense of the meaning).
Hiras welcome to the world of internet forum. Its good to see that you found out about this forum! But its a bit late…. But I guess better late than never… Also I think the ‘official spokesman’ is a nice touch, but a bit more than necessary….You can leave the tie off, after all this is the internet…!
 

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post #14 of 27
11/10/11 at 2:02am
I'm assuming he got an email notification about a reply to his thread. I would be curious... would you not be?
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post #15 of 27
11/10/11 at 2:22am
Thread Starter 
Sullivan,

For a guy with exactly one post on the forum, you certainly have a strong opinion about other newbies! I've got you beat by two posts! (three counting this one). I did indeed find out about the reply from an email notification.

To clarify, I signed up for this forum knowing little about custom clothes. I am, as I described myself, a newbie (although I did buy a jacket and shirts from William Sani about 25 years ago. To my taste, they were nice.). I am not a shill.


Juliet,

Your replies have been the most polite rebuttals I think I've ever seen! To clarify, the jacket I was referring to was actually awaiting delivery to a customer later that day. It was just hanging there in the hotel room. I didn't mention the vendor name in my original posting because, as a newbie, I didn't feel qualified to judge what I was seeing. I still don't, and I regret mentioning your company's name in my reply. For all I know, the jacket that I saw hanging there was a work in progress, not yet complete. For all I know, it was an example of flawless tailoring!

I'm tempted to remove my original post entirely, but I can't see a way to do that. So please everyone who reads this, I'm the Thread Starter saying that I never intended to trash talk Hiras, who may be a good custom clothing vendor.
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