Pretty amazing that Brooks bespoke suits topped out at less than $2k in 2005 dollars.

Anyone know when Press stopped offering custom?

Izzy, at LS Men's Clothing, knows them all.
He uses H. Freeman for MTM. He previously used Grieco (Southwick) too.
He sometimes gets cancelled MTM orders from Hickey Freeman, where the customer cancelled after Hickey made the coat, but before the trousers were even started. Izzy sold me such a coat. It fit perfectly, but the sleeves had to be finished, as it was set up for working button holes. He knew both of the good trouser makers and sent the material off to one of them to be made. They were perfect.
I also understand he has a good vest maker.
Once in a while, when he has some especially good material and one of the few remaining custom tailors is in a slack period, Izzy has that tailor make up suits, using his own material, to standard sizes. Strange, sort of being able to buy a custom quality tailored suit, made to no one's particular measure, but just to a 40R or 42R, etc.

Last edited by Jerrysfriend (2006-05-24 16:32:11)

Because so many liked the other article from the NY Times, here's one on the same subject from the LA Times.


--------------------
Brooks Drops Custom Line?  How Unsuitable!
by Gilbert Millstein, LA Times, Aug 15, 1976.

When Brooks Brothers announced recently that after 158 years it would no longer run up suits to order (this is known as bespoke tailoring), my reaction (I will try not to exaggerate) was one of disjointure, a slight dizziness, a sense of being in Cleveland, a feeling of malaise of the kind induced by discovering that one has a left home in one blue sock and one black.

But the fact is that I have never owned a Brooks custom-tailored suit.  I just thought about it a lot, not unlike a friend of mine who, until he became a Brooks customer, had a recurring dream.  In this dream, he walked into Brooks barefoot and wearing a borrowed Burberry raincoat underneath.  He would approach a salesman, open the raincoat and say, “Dress me.”  This man ultimately made money and the dream ended.

However, now he has to settle for ready-made or so-called “special-order” suits at Brooks (in special-order, a stock pattern is used; alterations to the pattern are made to suit individual customers, though, and the suit is cut from the bolt) and he has begun to sleep fitfully.

Now, there is no news in it when just any old store gives up custom tailoring, but there is when Brooks does, even though its custom suits, at $500 or $600 a pop, were by no means the most expensive made.  At the end, custom-tailored suits made up only one-half of 1% of all the suits sold by Brooks and they never were the backbone of the company’s business.  It was just the idea that Brooks Brothers had stopped doing something.  Custom tailoring has declined because it costs too much and the kind of people who can do it are fewer, frailer and older; not many you men, are willing to take it up.

Indeed, there is evidence that Brooks was either the first clothing establishment in the United States to offer read-made clothing, or one of the first.  For all these years, it has been a relentless innovator while skillfully managing to avoid Jacobinism, and it is still the glass of fashion and the mold of form for an awful lot of people.  I think it is not unreasonable to say that no other clothier in the history of mankind has been so celebrated.

Scott Fitzgerald dressed his star-crossed heroes in Brooks suits.  John O’Hara took the measure of his protagonists by the cut of their clothing (the good guys went to Brooks; the heels wore padded shoulders and severely pegged pants), and Mary McCarthy wrote a short story which is as famous for its title as for the story.  It is called “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.”  In its time, Brooks has dressed among many others, Astors, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, five generations of Morgans, and Clark Gable.

Generals Sherman, Sheridan and Grant went to Brooks for both military gear and mufti.  Presidents Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office in Brooks suits.  Franklin Roosevelt did not, but the naval capes he was so fond of wearing were ordered up for him from Brooks.  Gerald Ford showed upon in Tokyo to meet the emperor of Japan in a Brooks morning coat and ascot.  (He wore striped trousers three inches too short, but he didn’t get them from Brooks).

Very likely, the most famous Brooks suit of all belong to Abraham Lincoln.  He was assassinated in it by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington.  Booth’s dislike of Lincoln was political and had nothing to do with the cut of his clothing.

There are no more Brookses at Brooks Brothers.  The last family member retired a few years ago.  The company has been owned for the last 30 years by the Garfinkel department store people of Washington, and although it would be foolish to say that they don’t put in their two cents at Brooks, it is fair to say that they have exercised remarkable restraint.  They reward has been that Brooks Brothers is not simply pretty much what is used to be, but there is also much more of it and the only time it has lost money was during the three years preceding our entry into World War II.  Last year, Brooks grossed in the neighborhood of $60 million, its biggest gross.  Its dollar profit also set a record.

Brooks today includes the Madison Avenue headquarters, a store in the Wall Street district (close to Trinity Church, God and the stock exchange), and 14 branches around the country, including downtown Los Angeles.  All of their branches take their direction from Madison Avenue.  They cater to the same kind of people New York does, but they don’t carry as much, at it is quite common for, say, a Dallas client to call New York and have things sent.  The Madison Avenue store opened in 1915 and doesn’t look to much different today.  (Neither does Trinity Church).  It is all vehemently hushed gentility, all subdued wood paneling and carpeting and lighting and old lithographs and paintings of New York City on one floor or another; clothing and furnishings still heaped on counters as well as one racks; a group of salesmen who, whatever their ages, seem to have been installed with the paneling.  I think the loudest noise I have ever heard at Brooks Brothers has been the snap of salesman’s account book.

Brooks maintaining an unassailable imperturbability and prospered through the years.  It doesn’t always do to take the word of a man who is selling one something, but Brooks president Frank Reilly has put it about as well anyone, and the trade appears to back him up.  “Our customers,” he observed, “want to be comfortable.  They’re self-assured.  They don’t need clothing to project themselves.  They feel no need to be clotheshorse.

“We have been called the strongest single influence on men’s wear in the United States, and we have been.  We have always found acceptance by sticking to our last.”

The principal ingredient of the Brooks last, to mix metaphors, is a suit which in its essentials has not changed since it was designed about a decade or so before the end of the 19th Century.  All there is to it’s a three-button jacket with immutably natural shoulders, straight-legged trousers (20 inches at the knee, 18 at the cuff), and determinedly soft construction.  The wearer quite often seems to have wider hips than shoulders and to slump a little even when standing erect.

Brooks makes more than 40% of its suits in its factory in Queens.  The rest are made by other manufacturers who adhere eagerly to Brooks’s specifications, secure in the knowledge that generally there be few changes.  The firm tries out its new models on salesmen and buyers; they wear them for months before they are accepted or rejected.  John Lafrage, who manages Brooks’s clothing factory and designs as well, remembers some of the things that were said when lapels were widened by one-quarter inch, including, “it’s a terribly thing,” and “We can’t sell that stuff, it isn’t Brooks.”  The two-model button went to three and seven-eights in 1970 and sold.  And recently, the company put together a model with the four-and-a-quarter-inch lapel, which is being tried out, reluctantly, by a buyer who prefers to remain unidentified.

“Everybody,” Lafrage says, “looked the other way.”

It’s touch-and-go whether he the model will ever be put into production.  There is a feeling in the trade that, although lapels may never go back to three inches, they are going to get narrower again, if not in tribute to Brooks, then certainly to common sense.

Among other things, Brooks introduced the deerstalker hat to his country, the first suits made of woven stretch cloth, and possibly the first double-knits; the first cotton and polyester shirts, Shetland sweaters, sports jackets of bleeding madras and mirabile dictu the button-down shirt.

Brooks has always looked to England for materials and ideas.  Some time before 1900, a member of the family, taking his easy during a buying trip, happened to be watching a polo match.  He noted that the long points of the collars of the players’ shirts were buttoned-down so that the breeze wouldn’t blow them up over their eyes.  Upon his return he proposed that the company make it.  The button-down began here as a sports shirt and evolved slowly into a dress shirt.  For decades, it has been widely imitated by other shirtmakers, but none of them has ever been able to match the thunderous roll to the points of the Brooks button-down collar.  Some have tried to wish it out of existence.

During the feverish changes of the 1960’s, the merchandising manager of another shirtmaker declared, “There’s no reason to beat a dead horse; the button-down is out.”  In 1970, the manager of Sulka’s New York store said, “Button-downs were the ultimate symbol of uptightness.  Today’s man has to be freer and looser if he is to survive.”

Those were the Dark Ages.  Two years later, though, the vice president and fashion director of Bonwit Teller noted an unexpected resurgence of the button-down collar.  He told an interviewer, “Men have gotten the peackockery out of their systems.  They feel it’s now time to return to good taste.”  Over at Brooks, a spokesman departed from the company’s usual reticence.

“It’s nice,” he said, “to know you’re right.”

Another fascinating article.


Thank you.

Another piece of the puzzle:



Brooks Brothers to Move a Plant
Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition).  New York, N.Y.:  Oct 21, 1991. pg. B10A

Abstract (Document Summary)

Marks & Spencer PLC unit Brooks Brothers Inc plans to move production of its private label men's tailored clothing from its Long Island NY plant to one in Syracuse NY. Workers will be offered positions along with the move.
Full Text (103   words)
Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Oct 21, 1991

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Brooks Brothers Inc. said it will move production of its private label men's tailored clothing from its Long Island City, N.Y., plant to a Syracuse, N.Y., plant.

The unit of Marks & Spencer PLC, London, said the move will affect about 260 workers who manufacture suits, jackets and other men's clothing items at the Long Island City plant. The workers will be offered positions at the Syracuse plant. The company said the decision to move was made because the Long Island City plant needed expensive renovations. About 130 employees will stay at this plant to produce neckties and handle alterations.