From time to time, we have news to impart either from or about Dave's Custom Tailoring. Sometimes it's an announcement of a great new material that's been released; sometimes it's an article that been written about Dave in a magazine or on the web.
There is a simple explanation why Shanghai, once synonymous with custom tailoring, now has far fewer tailors than Hong Kong: the Mao suit (or the Sun Yat-sen suit, as it's known in China).
Things quickly turned sour for Shanghai's famed custom tailors in the late 1940s. According to China's most celebrated tailor, Dave KC Shiung, the golden age of the Shanghai tailor began to unravel with the occupation of Shanghai by the Japanese in 1937, and ended once and for all in the following decade. The city's traditonally trained custom tailors, shorn of custom and inspiration, left to seek more fashion conscious pastures. Most ended up in Hong Kong, giving the city its modern-day reputation as Asia's tailoring capital.
In fact, the story may well have ended there - were it not for the work of one man. Dave Shiung's master handiwork now sees hundreds of Hong Kong-based professionals shun the city's finest tailors and make the pilgrimage to Beijing and Shanghai for some quality time with the man often described as the world's best tailor.
Hong Kong-based investment banker Doug Griffin, who works for Macquarie Bank, is one of Dave's biggest fans. "Dave does a couple of things that no-one in Hong Kong or even on Savile Row can do," he explains. "He can take that quality and whip out a suit in a quarter of the time and at a fraction of the price. We come up here all the time."
To put things into perspective, a typical Savile Row suit will take between six and 12 weeks to produce and will leave a sizeable dent in your wallet. The much lauded K-50, for instance, made by Italian fashion house Kiton, requires around two months of regular fittings and will set you back a cool USD 50,000. Dave can produce the same quality in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost.
"Dave makes the best suits I've ever had and he does it in 40 hours," said Griffin. "Let me put it this way. I save money flying up here for the weekend to get my suits," he said.
Born in Taiwan in 1949, Dave learnt his trade from the age of 15 when he began an apprenticeship with a Shanghainese master who had relocated to Taipei. After cutting suits for ambassadors, presidents and even kings, Dave moved his operation to the mainland just over a decade ago. He set up his first outlet in Beijing's Kerry Centre in 1996 before returning to the source of his inspiration, Shanghai, a few years ago, when he opened a second store in the French Concession.
The vast majority of his estimated 8,000 customers are foreign businessman. "Tailoring stopped in the late 1940s, so for the Chinese it's a gap in the tradition. Also, for Chinese consumers brands now dominate. Before the market opened up, there was a huge interest in brands. For the Chinese, the image of a local tailor is of inferior quality, cheap suits - and no recognizable label," said Dave.
What this meant for Dave was simple. Catering to the foreign business market meant producing top-quality results in as short a time as possible. "Foreign visitors can't sit around for six weeks to collect their suits," he explains.
In Forbes magazine's ongoing mapping of the corporate genome, Dave takes his place in this year's list of the world's premier custom tailors as the tailor with a difference. He is at home in the Haute Couture company of Kilgour of London, Sydney's JH Cutler and Milan's Brioni, but the difference in time and cost - not to mention pretension - is vast. When it comes to efficiency - crisp custom suits at very crisp turnarounds - he has no equal. The hand-stitching, contrasting lining, lapel width, working buttonholes - all of these are tailored to the most minute detail. "A good custom tailor has absolute knowledge and pride in their craft," he says.
On the technical front, Dave admires classic English materials but provides an array of imports from Europe and around the world - his range of fabrics number well over 1,000. In fact the breadth of Dave's selection includes every imaginable color, cross, check, stripe, pin, and texture of worsted, cashmere, tweed, flannel, wool and wool blends right up to the fabulously fine vicuna - a precious cloth woven from the wool of the camelid, (think llama, only noisier, funnier and harder to find). A bolt of vicuna marks out a tailor who knows his stuff and has customers who demand the best.
As for the cut, Dave favors the 'full canvas' (handmade with a piece of woven linen and horse or camel hair between the jacket's exterior fabric and interior lining), over the 'fused' (melded together with glue). Among the benefits of full canvas are that it's more durable and will give a far more contoured and natural fit. Fused suits tend to be stiffer and the glue breaks down over a long period of time. However, they require much less prep time and are noticeably cheaper.
GET FIT
The easy part of choosing a suit is deciding your shape. On the whole this can be done by going through photos, finding whichever picture looks good and taking it to your tailor.
The inevitable moment of panic will set in when faced with the dazzling array of fabrics. Whittle down the choices by thinking about purpose and environment. When and where will you be wearing your suit? Jetting across continents or selling compressed semi-conductors in Harbin?
Take note of the micron count (the diameter of each wool fibre) and the thread count (the number of threads in the weft and weave). The higher the micron count, the lower the thread count, the harder your suit's fabric will work. A banker in Beijing's World Trade Center, for instance, might want a pure wool worsted suit with a low micron count, high thread count (120 to 130 is just fine), as the suit shouldn't be subjected to too much wear and tear. A salesman, on the other hand, who regularly pounds the concrete in the coarse Shanghai air may be better off with a high micron count, and lower thread count.
The easy part of choosing a suit is deciding your shape. On the whole this can be done by going through photos, finding whichever picture looks good and taking it to your tailor.
The inevitable moment of panic will set in when faced with the dazzling array of fabrics. Whittle down the choices by thinking about purpose and environment. When and where will you be wearing your suit? Jetting across continents or selling compressed semi-conductors in Harbin?
Take note of the micron count (the diameter of each wool fibre) and the thread count (the number of threads in the weft and weave). The higher the micron count, the lower the thread count, the harder your suit's fabric will work. A banker in Beijing's World Trade Center, for instance, might want a pure wool worsted suit with a low micron count, high thread count (120 to 130 is just fine), as the suit shouldn't be subjected to too much wear and tear. A salesman, on the other hand, who regularly pounds the concrete in the coarse Shanghai air may be better off with a high micron count, and lower thread count.
Using the same methods as tailors on Savile Row, Shiung creates classic made-to-order business suits. Each takes an average of 40 hours to make. Want a suit made from a rare fabric you once found in Italy? More than likely, Shuing will have it; his fabric selection exceeds 1,000.
In this article, Dave's Custom Tailoring is listed alongside tailoring giants including Kilgour (London), Turnbull and Asser (New York, Beverly Hills), Galeries Lafayette (Paris), and Brioni Bespoke (Milan).
SHANGHAI - Officially this is the Xuhui District, but things don't seem to have changed much since it was part of the French Concession. From this stretch of Wuyuan Road you dom't see showy skyscrapers or shopping malls. Only walled lanes and leafy trees and those vaguely Mediterranean villas thatlook like they belong in Beverly Hills. There are a lot of foreign consulates around here, and a lot of businesses that cater to them.
All Saturday afternoon you see the young European and American men heading down Lane 288 for the three-story house with the Corinthian columns and the wrought-iron balconies. Dave the Tailor stays open seven days a week, but it's the weekends when the new customers come, the expat enterprisers and entrepreneurs who are too busy empire building on Monday through Friday.
On Dave's ground floor they walk into a wood-paneled room decorated with a selection of the thick silk ties standard for Shanghai business attire, Dave's display of the eight kinds of shirt collar ("LongPoint," "Italian Wide," "Round Wide," etc.), Dave's labeled examples of the 12 types of shirt cuff, and shelves of swatch books from Hield, Scabal, Loro Piana and Holland & Sherry. They furrow their brows or press their lips together or do whatever else it takes to look like they know what they're doing. They stroke the samples. They stare. They dont say much.
"I had in my mind what I wanted: The staff knew directly," says Lars, a 31 year-old German who's feeling pretty good about himself right now. Typical of today's first-timers, Lars "heard about this place from a friend," decided upon "a dark blue" and ordered one suit and one shirt today "to try it out." Also typically, his suit will take at least one or two more fittings, 40 to 50 hours of handwork, cost him under 535 American dollars, and be ready in about two weeks' time - or as little as 10 days if he needs it faster. If he stays true to type, Lars will then be back for more.
Like anybody who's been around Shanghai, Lars knows he could have gone to Dongjiadu Lu, where custom suits cost less than a third of Dave's. Or Silk King, which specializes in quick turnarounds for tourists. Or hundreds of other tailors, all of whom would have undoubtedly pledged even deeper discounts and faster delivery.
"I know this is affordable," he boasts. "But I also know that here I will get the same quality I would get at home in Europe."
And that is where Lars' bravado betrays him. Because if he,or any of the other young men who've been here today, were more experienced, if they knew the cost of the wools and cashmeres in those swatch books, or understood the made-to-measure suits sold in the specialty stores back home in Stuttgart or Chicago or Manchester, or could actually afford Savile Row, or had tried tailors in Hong Kong, then they'd appreciate the difference between what they'd get there and what they're getting here.
And they'd understand why Dave the Tailor is so much better.
Depending on who's doing the talking, the tailors here were either the best in the world outside Savile Row, or the best in the world, period.
"Before the Japanese came was the Gold Age for Shanghai tailors," says Dave, who's something of a student of the subject. Their very best years, he says, were 1928 to 1937. Dave has his own theories about how that happened, which mostly have to do with the confluence of politics and economics and immigration that created a sort of sartorial perfect storm in 20th-century Shanghai.
According to him, it all got started when foreign legations took over the city in 1842 and Western tailoring tradition met Eastern labor supply. Then came the Jewish immigrants: "The best tailors then maybe Jewish, maybe English." Shanghai was also a major port, so fine woolens were easy to come by. Customers abounded. "From 1900 to 1937 every business was here," Dave points out, "It was 'Go to Shanghai, find a job. Go to tailor, find a suit.'"
Last but not least, Shanghai had "the supply of poor young boys aged 11 to 20 from Jiangsu." As he explains: "It was a poor age, and a lot of people leave home to find a future. They never go to school, but they need to continue life. ... Tailors pay nothing or pay very little - only for food. They can spend many, many hours on suits."
Dave may understand that part of the Shanghai tradition better than anybody else. Dave K.C. Sheung was born in Taiwan in 1949 to a family that couldn't afford to keep him in school. So, at age 15, he found himself apprenticed to a Shanghai master tailor who'd ended up in Taipei during the diaspora of tailoring talent caused by World War II. At age 27 Dave set out his own shingle. In the late '90s he headed for the mainland: first to Beijing (where he still keeps a shop at the Kerry Centre). About two years ago things came full circle when he set up headquarters here in Shanghai.
Between his two shops, Dave has a base of about 5,000 steady customers - 98 to 99 percent of them foreigners. "The Chinese were cut off for 50 years. Before the market opened they heard a lot about brand names," he says philosophically. "For the Chinese, the image of a local tailor is bad quality and cheap suits."
Non-natives, however, know differently. Dave dresses quite a few bigwigs from the Beijing embassies and Shanghai consulates. Some are visiting dignitaries (Dave is too discreet to name names), who order five or 10 suits at a clip. When Samer Chamsi-Pasha, who as managing director of Hield basically owns a London-based tailored clothing company, came through town last summer with his oldest son, he commissioned the boy's first suit from Dave. As Peter Ackroyd, director general of the British Wool Textile Export Corporation, puts it: "One can't stop in Shanghai without seeing Dave."
Dave doesn't do anything fancy with shoulders or suppressed waists or half-canvases. He says customers come because he "makes the suit fit." For the first 20 years or so, he fussed through at least two or three fittings per suit. "Now I can get it in one." His highest praise: "smooth," as in "fit should be smooth, not big and not small" or "all my team are smooth."
It's impossible to coax him into a conversation about silhouette or drape. "A tailor makes the man. Designers make designer suits: You look like someone, but not yourself," he says emphatically. "A tailor is not a designer. A business suit is a unifonn. It is not fashion. A suit has only one style: natural and comfortable."
Sometimes his customers come in convinced otherwise. "Some say, 'I want to look like a Giorgio Armani' or 'a Brioni.' They bring pictures." Dave says he used to humor them.
"Now I say, 'I can do even better.' And they believe me."
FAKE DAVES ARE EVERYWHERE. (There's a notorious imposter next to the Portman Ritz-Carlton, the swanky five-star hotel on Nanjing Xilu.) A couple of the copycats even have the nerve to charge more than the original, authentic Dave. "People say, 'Dave, raise the price,; and I say 'No.' This is China. Young men comc here to risk, to start a new life. They're at the beginning of the new life, they're not rich now."
Dave's second-favorite customer is the father brought in by the son, but he doesn't really focus on the fat cats. His absolute favorite is the guy just starting out. "I like it when I get a customer who's 21 or 22, then I have him for 30 or 40 years. If I only have older men, then the business is gone in a generation."
His 40 employees are his own next generation, and when he calls them "my family" he says it with a sense that's very different from a genial, American-style boss. "Once you come to my door, that's it." Dave has never fired anybody. Ever. Boys who don't make good tailors are trained in other parts of the business. The ones who do make good tailors are "the ones who want to learn," and, crucially, "their blood family must be poor."
"In Savile Row, the customers are getting old; the tailors are getting old. In England, this business has nowhere to go.
