My father’s philosophy on tailors and made to measure clothing
My father loved dressing well. This led to a series of rather funny and sometimes wise idiosyncratic behaviors. First of all my father was a firm believer in made to measure clothing. He would say that «une des aberrations de notre époque est de nous faire croire que c’est au corps de s’adapter au vêtement or qu’au contraire, le vêtement doit s’adapter au corps ». Therefore he was a firm believer in made to measure clothing. Every Friday at least, after lunch, we walk around downtown Cairo and go to stores that sold cloth by the meter. Back then there were still some government owned Egyptian companies that produced good quality cotton. He taught me how to recognize different fabrics, prints and wools. Which prints and fabrics should be used for casual blazers and which should be used for suits as well as a series of other archaic or classical rules around men’s clothing. He had a constant défilé of tailors. In my childhood I remember him still being able to resort to the odd Italian or Greek tailor who had somehow and for some reason stayed behind after Nasser had kicked the foreigners out of Egypt. As they began to die out he started to find Egyptian tailors trained by foreign tailors. They also died out. He had at least a tailor and a shirt maker in every city. In Alexandria he went to Mr. Hassan El Gamal, a half blind and completely crazy tailor who had a severe hoarding problem and who loved cats. He had been trained to make uniforms for the military. His shirt maker was Leon, a Greek man front Alexandria who was extremely skilled. I have a few of his shirts, my father had decided I needed about 7 of them. He died of a very violent pancreatic cancer a few years ago. Towards the end of my father’s life all his tailors had died out and no competent replacements close enough to his house could be found (Lotfy pacha liked to be in walking distance of his tailors and have his fittings done at home). Yesterday professor El Hadidi took me to a store in old Cairo where an old business, Hesny, revived the skill of cloth production. There I was able to find most of the fabrics my father taught me to recognize. Incredible gabardine, cotton popeline, voile de cotton and even linen. The customer service was incredible. I discovered that my father must have had a really good time discussing different fabrics and their different uses while I sat sulking in a corner waiting to leave. It is another more personalized approach to commerce where you sit down, drink tea, discuss at leisure and take your time choosing.
The pictures depict the different prints of cotton popeline, the store front of Hesny and the rest of the fabric market of old Cairo which mostly sells towels and linge de maison imported from China and Turkey.
Oh and the weather was a balmy 42 degrees in the sun.
A pile of cotton popeline with beautiful prints, available at the Hesni showroom
The awning of the Hesni showroom
There were a group of fabric carriers outside of the store, one of them joked that he had been waiting outside the store for 7000 years and was as old as Ramses himself. He clearly wasn’t feeling well in the heat.
The inside of the Hesni fabric showroom
El Darb El Ahmar
The entrance to labyrinthe of alleyways of the Darb El Ahmar
