The tailors at the Night Bazaar

VIP Tailor, Chiang Mai: a shop, not a showroom

Most tailor shops near a tourist strip are shopfronts. The measuring happens at the counter, the order goes to a workshop somewhere else, and nobody in the room has any real stake in whether the shoulder sits properly.

That is not how this works. The cutting happens here. When Raj marks a sleeve pitch at your second fitting, the correction goes to the bench, not into an email. It is a smaller operation than the big Changklan Road shopfronts and that is deliberate, because the number of garments in progress is capped by how many the shop can personally supervise.

Four brothers

Four brothers have worked on this floor: Raj, Max, Harry and TK. They are the tailors and the managers here. Raj measures and cuts, and between them they run the floor, the fittings and the workshop.

TK was the youngest of us, and he died. We miss our brother very, very much.

If you came to the Night Bazaar in the years he was here, there is a good chance you met him, and a good chance you still remember him. He was the warm one and the funny one, the brother who talked to everybody who came through the door. Years later people still walk in holding a business card he handed them, and put it on the counter, and tell us something he said to them. It happens more often than you would think.

He is still part of this shop and part of what it is, and we would rather say so here than quietly leave him out of it.

What made to measure actually means here

There is a lot of loose language in this trade, so it is worth being precise.

A garment made here starts from a pattern drafted to your measurements. It is not a stock size taken in at the waist. That distinction shows up in the places off-the-rack clothing cannot solve: a sloping shoulder, one arm longer than the other, a chest and waist that belong to different sizes, a seat that needs room without the trouser looking baggy.

You will be measured for around fifteen points on the body, and asked about how you intend to wear the garment. Whether a jacket needs to close over a shirt or over a waistcoat changes the drape enough to matter.

Construction

The construction of a jacket is the part you cannot see and the part that decides how it ages. A fused jacket has its front panel glued to an interlining. It is fast and cheap and it will bubble at the chest after enough dry cleaning. A canvassed jacket has a layer of horsehair canvas floating between the cloth and the lining, held with hand-padding stitches, which lets the chest mould to your shape over time instead of fighting it.

We build half canvas as standard and full canvas on request. If you want the longer version of this argument, the construction guide sets out what each method costs you and what it buys.

Made by hand, by people who have done it for decades

The garments are made by hand. Not hand-finished on top of a production line, made by hand.

The work is done by a small group of Thai families who have been doing it for decades, working together, each of them good at a particular part of it. That is the reason the finishing holds up and the reason the shoulder sits the way it does, because a machine set for volume cannot make those decisions and a person who has cut ten thousand of them can.

It is also the honest answer to why this costs less than the same garment in London or New York. There is no factory floor to pay for and no middleman between the shop and the people doing the work, so the difference reaches you instead of somebody in between.

Worth saying plainly, because people sometimes ask it carefully: this is not charity and nobody here wants it framed that way. These are skilled people being paid properly for skilled work they are extremely good at. What the money does is feed families in Chiang Mai rather than a supply chain, and that is simply a better outcome for everybody, including you.

Why people come here

The honest answer is price and speed, and there is no point pretending otherwise. A hand-made suit in Chiang Mai costs a fraction of the same garment in London or Sydney, for the reasons set out above, and it can be finished inside a trip rather than over a season.

What we would rather be judged on is the second suit. A good deal on a first suit brings someone in once. People come back, and send colleagues and family, when the first one still hangs properly two years later. That is the part that is difficult to fake and the reason the review count sits where it does.

The shop

The fabric wall runs the length of the room: worsted wools for suiting, linens and cotton-linen blends for the climate, silks and silk blends for womenswear, and heavier cloths for anyone ordering an overcoat to take home to a colder country.

We are on Changklan Road, a short walk from the Night Bazaar night market. If you are staying in the old city or on the river, it is a ten minute ride.