I was watching some old clips of an Anthony Bourdain series called “Raw Craft” this afternoon. There is a quote in the intro that made me smile and nod.
“The term “hand-crafted” gets thrown around a lot these days. It’s become a movement, a “trend”, and it can obscure the passionate people who actually make things by hand.”
That term does get thrown around a lot.
Add “hand made” to the tagline of any product and the price jumps dramatically, and so does the mystery. When I hear that phrase, I automatically wonder: Who's hands? Are those hands being exploited? Are those hands being taken care of properly? Why are those hands special? How long have those hands been making? Depending on the product or situation sometimes the answers are quickly evident. Sometimes they are hidden behind layers of false romance and branding that are hard to peel back to see what we're really buying into.
Ultimately we can't always know, and that's ok. I don't want to throw stones at anyone else's business efforts. I cannot control what other people do, or the standards they set, but I can take this opportunity to tell people who are considering becoming a patron or friend of our project, exactly what I mean when I use the words "hand made".
There are three points that I feel the need to communicate.
The first thing I'd like to be loudly explicit about are our processes. I take immense pride in making garments that are long, hard wearing friends you will be able to hold onto for decades.
On "Hand made" Tailoring:
I am deeply in love with analogue hand-craft. Like most tailors, I do a large amount of hand sewing, hand embroidery and hand buttonholing. I like it that way, and I never want to change. In a world full of machinists, I find it is a political act to slow down and use your hands. However, I tend toward the English when it comes to sensibility and stability. It is necessary, for the sake of making a durable garment, to machine over some seams that may receive a good deal of stress, or the seams that machines do better.
For example: It is practical and sensible to use a machine when sewing the long seams on a pair of trousers. The stitching is even, it’s sturdy, and I also always machine twice, for extra strength. These seams receive stress when we bend our knees, crouch, or even just sit in a chair. I’d like the trousers we produce to last as long as possible, so we use a sewing machine from time to time. I run and guide the machine with my hands, but in that case I think those seams are “machine sewn”. That being said, all of the bar tacks, pick stitching, hemming, embroidery, pad stitching, and felling is done 100% by hand.