Been reading Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma", which goes into great detail about the damage that an excessive reliance on industrial agriculture (epitomized by corn) is doing to our health and wellbeing.  He makes an excellent case for sustainable, locally based agriculture, not even Big Organic as we know it.  I like buying food from local farmers' markets, artisanal providers etc. where possible, mostly because the food tastes better when you know where it came from.  Pollan's book just provides an extra 'push' to take it even further.  Not to be a vegetarian, which is where most of these kind of books want to lead, but to care more about the origins and processing of the food we eat every day.  Even the steaks and the chicken.

In the clothing industry, Ralph Lauren polo shirts are stamped out by the thousands in China by sweatshop workers being paid pennies an hour.  And I'm pretty sure in the factory next door, Zegna shirts that sell for four times as much are stamped out by a similar team of poorly-paid garment workers in unsafe conditions and god knows what environmental hazards.  They use fabric that comes from unknown mills, shipped in containerized vessels burning vast amounts of fossil fuels and deposited in Target or Brooks Brothers for you to buy.  We support this system whenever we go to the mall and buy clothing.

It's interesting to me that bespoke tailoring is one place where, I hope, one goes in and works with an individual craftsperson who then creates a garment for you and is paid a reasonable fee for this service.  It is a pre-industrial business model that is inherently an anachronism in today's world, a last toenail vestige from the medieval guilds.  Bespoke suits cost a lot because that is how much ALL clothing shoud cost, in fact how much nice clothes DID cost centuries ago in relative terms.  But walking into a Savile Row tailors you are supporting this nearly extinct business model. That is why I like the idea so much.  The craft.  If you have a bespoke suit by an individual tailor, you have something of his direct hand.  That cannot be said for any industrial garment, even 'hand made' (by aforementioned sweatshop labor at pennies an hour among thousands).

But the tailor works with fabrics.  Everything we wear comes from a sheep or a cow or a goat or a cotton plant or an oil rig.  Every piece of cloth at a Jermyn Street shirtmaker came from someone.  And at the high end is where one finds the artisanal fabric mills, using outdated equipment, producing limited amounts, one would hope at lower environmental impact than a massive industrial textile mill.  Textiles are some of the most environmentally damaging industries out there.  Capitalism and the modern industrial society is built upon this, for food and for clothing.  Millions of people, maybe billions, benefit from this and are exploited by this at the same time.

I'm not saying that capitalism is wrong, or that the industrial society capitalism has built since the mid 19th century should be scrapped.  It cannot be, without leading to wide scale poverty and ruin.  Nor should it be. But when one buys a bespoke shirt from an individual craftsperson, using fabric from a small family run textile mill in Italy or somewhere, with wool shaved off of reasonably happy sheep, you get a better product and you are, in a way, helping keep alive something that Ralph Lauren or Gucci or Hanes are not.  It isn't even a very cost-effective status symbol (a $200 shirt with a big Gucci logo on it does that trick far more effectively).  Supporting bespoke in 2006 is a rebellious act. One that I, for one, can get behind much more happily than throwing rocks at a G8 conference or wearing some ghastly hemp monstrosity or going vegan. 

What I'm trying to say is, give three-piece a chance.