Bespoke.

When I first heard the word, I thought it meant some kind of talking, as in, “He bespoke of the movie,” or, “I bespoke the truth.”

Needless to say, that’s not what it meant. At least not fully.

After some relentless online digging, I found the real meaning of the word, along with some interesting history.

Did you know?
The word “bespoke” actually means custom-made, in reference to things of any kind, specialized to the buyer’s preference. It is the opposite of ready-made. When applied to fashion, however, the term bespoke is only used for men’s suits and clothing, making it a parallel to the women’s haute couture label of individually cut and designed garments.

Why should I care?
Unlike haute couture, bespoke is not a protected label. This upset a lot of men in fashion, especially tailors, so the Savile Row Bespoke Association was set up in 2004 to protect the integrity of the art of tailoring in London’s West End. In 2006, the Savile Row Bespoke became a label, established for simple identification of suits and garments made specifically on Savile Row (and surrounding streets). So while bespoke is not a protected label, the Savile Row Bespoke Association has made itself a trademarked brand, and is working towards making bespoke clothing protected, so that it can be the male fashion equivalent to women’s haute couture. However, they haven’t been successful in achieving that goal yet, which is probably why not that many people today know what it means, or even that it exists.

Linguistics
Remember when I said that I thought that the word bespoke meant speaking the first time I heard it? Well, a little bit more digging through the interwebz told me that I was sort of right: bespoke is actually the past tense of the word bespeak. It used to be pretty popular back in Ye Olden Days, when it would mean to speak up or call out.

Towards the end of the 16th century, it started to mean arranging to get something done, getting someone to do a job, or ordering goods. Later, in the middle of the 18th century, the adjective “bespoke” appeared in English. Something that was “bespoke” was not ready-made, but made to order.

According to some sources, the word “bespoke” also came about from a tailor’s actions: once a customer selected a fabric or a length of material, then that material was said to “be spoken” for. This is supposed to be the symbol of a true or proper bespoke tailor: to make a set of patterns original and unique to the person who ordered them, to style them exclusively to that buyer’s needs and body, so that nobody else would feel quite at home in the same suit.

Ask a Tailor
In order to give you a slightly better look at bespoke and what it means, Jessica Wornette and I moseyed over to GreenShag Bespoke to speak with Neil McPhedran, tailor and co-founder of GreenShag. He told us that to him, bespoke meant just what we had discovered earlier: custom-made and custom-fit. Bespoke clothing, McPhedran says, is made specifically for the individual.

“I think true bespoke is bespoke, like haute couture, not made-to-measure,” he says.

He explained that made-to-measure is a sort of “middle ground between off-the-rack and custom” in which the clothing or garment is created from a set of already predetermined patterns and sizes from which a customer can choose the ones that they want or need.

“It is not like bespoke, where you start from nothing and design everything,” says McPhedran. Made-to-measure isn’t made individually and shouldn’t be considered custom bespoke wear. Saville Row is especially strict about that, he told us. Things that are just made from a pattern and not custom-fit shouldn’t be considered to be bespoke.

The average cost of a full bespoke suit from GreenShag is around $2,500. It depends on the fabrics and the materials used, but that is generally the price many bespoke tailors work with.

“I wouldn’t go anywhere else!” a customer exclaimed, as he allowed measurements of himself to be taken by the trained hands of the working tailor.

Further Reading
www.greenshag.com
www.savillerowbespoke.com
www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bes4
www.mycustomtailor.com/customtailor/The_History_Of_Bespoke_Tailoring_An_Overview

text by Sofie Mikhaylova
photography by Jessica da Silva

Anybody who’s spent more than ten minutes on Tumblr can tell you that there is no shortage of love for vintage clothing on the internet. However, usually the retro image-a-thon tends to be restricted to wealthier white women of eras gone, erasing from history the styles of women of colour. Threadbared’s Minh-Ha T. Pham has started Of Another Fashion, an online archive of images intent on putting a face (and an outfit) to the sides of sartorial history often overlooked. As she writes, “In providing a glimpse of women of colour’s material cultural histories - a glimpse that no doubt only begins to redress the curatorial and critical absence of minoritized fashion histories - this archive and the forthcoming exhibition commemorates lives and experiences too often considered not important enough to save or to study.” An exhibit of the same name is also being planned.

To contribute to Of Another Fashion, click here.

Photo by Clem Albers

Image: Shirtwaist factory workers preparing for a strike, from the National Women’s History Museum

On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers working in New York City - most of them young, immigrant women - lost their lives in a deadly fire. The rights of the workers were already undervalued in favour of increased production, and the overcrowded factory, unsanitary conditions and locked exits created a literal and violent death trap. The incident created an uproar concerning the dismal conditions under which these women were forced to work, and raised issues concerning labour and union rights still relevant today.

Cornell University: The Triangle Factory Fire
For those of you wishing to learn the basic facts concerning the fire, this website is an archive containing firsthand testimonials, newspaper articles, resources for further reading, and a detailed timeline of events, from the garment industry strikes of 1909 to the legal aftermath and protests.

The New York Times Tag: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
The Times has been building an excellent database of images, videos, and modern perspectives on lessons learned in the fire’s aftermath - and how far we have to go (see also Nancy Goldstein’s writing at the American Prospect).

American Experience: Triangle Fire
PBS has an hour long documentary that you can view in its entirety on their website. For those of you with access to HBO, they will be airing a documentary of their own several times within the next few weeks.

The Price of Fashion (1910)
While you are on the PBS website, be sure to check out this gallery of images taken in the years surrounding the fire, chronicling the working conditions that went into constructing the clothing seen in fashion magazines.

-Anna Fitzpatrick

“Fashion is a social force that functions effectively not only as an economic engine but as a semiotic system that transmits social and political messages by means of nonverbal language rich in signs, symbols and iconography.” - Ayala Raz, The Equalizing Shoe

For most people, shoes are not the first thing that come to mind when thinking about Jewish cultural heritage. However, after taking a look at Jews and Shoes, a compilation of fourteen academic essays on the apparently unique relationship Jewish people have had with shoes, one must rethink the assumption that shoes are of no particular importance.

Given the Jewish people’s legacy as eternal wanderers, it makes sense that footwear may have taken on a deeper meaning for them. However, this book is far more detailed than that. Split into four thematic sections, it covers a variety of cultural instances where shoes play an important role: religion and the Bible, memorials, political ideology and the arts. To my mind, the strongest essay in this book is a fascinating analysis that questions the commodity fetishism of the piles of shoes found at Holocaust memorials. Having never been to a Holocaust memorial myself, I was surprised to learn of their emphasis on displaying the personal items of those interred and killed at the camps to show the magnitude of the numbers of possessions that were methodically sorted into piles by Nazis intending to redistribute them later. The author, Jeffrey Feldman, does an absolutely superb job of relating memorial attendees’ very visceral reactions to these piles upon piles of shoes of all sorts and the sights, smells, and textures that come from all that rotting leather. The questions posed are not only thought provoking in terms of the legacy of the Holocaust, but about how artefacts and museum objects are structured and displayed in order to evoke an emotional response.

An ancient Roman sandal. Essentially the type of shoe referred to in the book as a ‘biblical sandal’.

Unfortunately, not all of the essays are as well done. I found the first section, dealing with religious and biblical references to shoes, to be weak and tedious. In this section more than any other, I was struck by the dullness of the academic writing style and found that these essays in particular suffer from the Cultural Studies vice of overanalyzing commonplace objects trying to extract more meaning than there is. Sometimes a shoe is just a shoe. At times it also felt as if I needed a working knowledge of the Bible in order to really understand the points that a few of these authors were trying to make. Maybe I’m wrong, and that reference to shoes in Exodus is more significant than I think, however, not having sat down with a copy of the Bible before tearing into this I was left feeling a bit drowned in biblical minutiae.

The profession of shoemaker has historically and traditionally be held by Jews.

That said, although it has its weaknesses, I do recommend this book. Even though it only deals with one culture, as a non-Jewish reader I was fascinated by the importance of shoes in human history, and, as one author puts it, “the communicative role of footwear.” Plus, since this is formatted as a collection of essays, you can dive in and out as you please. At the very least the wonderfully rhyming title will surely make you smile.

Jews and Shoes edited by Edna Nahshon (Berg, 2008).
Reviewed by Anisha Seth.