"Robert Jeffery"

Wow.  It's been 12 years since I started this blog. The focus has shifted over time, and I seem to have been writing less and less, mostly since life happened and I got busy (and married) and moved all over the place.  I feel the time is right to devote more time to blogging again, especially since I now have help.

The first major thing to talk about is the migration from Blogspot/Blogger and Flickr, etc. to my own site.  Sites like Blogspot are great because they are free and easy, but you don't really own your content (you get what you pay for).  Sadly, a lot of my photos in older posts are now lost because some photo hosting sites decided to change the terms and conditions.  I considered moving over to Instagram but that's just another place where you are at the mercy of someone in San Francisco.  The other thing is I have a lot of new projects on the go and I think it's time I consolidated everything into one spot.  So my new website, which is still being developed, can be found at robertjeffery.us. "Robert Jeffery" is also the name of the company I formed last year. 

The Tuttofattoamano/Made by Hand blog will be hosted under this umbrella, as well as a few related sites like my ladies wear (The Louise Collection), and an activewear collection to be launched later this year.  So I apologize for any inconvenience if you have come looking for old articles on Blogspot which you can`t find anymore but hopefully the new blog site at robertjeffery.us will be far more searchable so you can find old stuff more easily.

So what have I been up to lately?  I'm still happily busy at Hickey Freeman in Rochester, New York, but have been traveling back and forth to Montreal every week, spending time at our Samuelsohn facility, where we have made suits for almost 100 years, and recently also began sewing shirts, as well as a Canadian brand of outerwear called Moose Knuckles.

For almost a year now I have also been working on some new technology to draft patterns from body measurements with the intent to modernize made-to-measure (MTM).  I know there are tons of websites out there that claim to already make custom patterns from photos and body scans but I have yet to see technology that I would actually want to use and hang my reputation as a tailor on.  So I teamed up with some clever people in Europe who had already begun working on something and we will begin live beta testing in the very near future.  More on that soon.

Last summer I accidentally started a line of ladies tailored clothing.  By "accidentally", I mean I wanted to put together a little group of ladies' suits as a tribute to our late congresswoman, to be shown at a charity fundraiser in Rochester.  It didn't occur to me at the time people might actually be interested in buying the stuff, so we had to quickly cobble together a company and a website to make the line available publicly.  The Louise Collection belongs to Robert Jeffery, LLC, and is being produced at the factory that makes Hickey Freeman in Rochester.  Right now it is only made to measure, by appointment, but we are considering bringing it to a wider market through carefully selected retailers in the United States and maybe eventually Europe.

I couldn't have done any of that without the help of my husband, who is the director of operations for Robert Jeffery.  He is handling the website(s), the book keeping, billing, scheduling, daily operations, and is also my in-house Salesforce system admin.  A former competitive bodybuilder, he's always had trouble finding clothes, and I have always had trouble getting him into suits, which is a bit of a shame considering... Like the aforementioned technology, there are products on the market which purport to be made to fit athletic guys, but again, I found most of them lacking.  And the good ones in Europe and Australia are either super expensive to have shipped to the US, if they will even ship at all, and don't extend into the larger sizes needed by big American boys.  So he decided we should launch a line of activewear and athleisure for that specific market.  To the extent that the market will permit it, we want to have most or all of it made in the United States.  Again, more on that in due course.


So with all that said, I'll stop posting here on Blogspot - go check out our new home on the web at https://robertjeffery.us/tuttofattoamano/

[Please go to the new Tuttofattoamano to comment]

Going Down the Vintage Rabbit Hole

Part One.

The first recorded sale of Hickey Freeman merchandise to the retailer Capper & Capper of Chicago was in 1912. This was also the year that Hickey Freeman opened its new building, known as the Temple to Fine Tailoring.

I recently put my hands on a suit whose exact age was unknown but vintage clothing experts estimated to be mid-1920's. When I got it I did some research and from the labeling I was able to place it squarely between 1920 and 1932. Still a large window of time. Fortunately the styling helped me narrow it down. The suit is made from a herringbone-woven tweed; a 3-roll-2 button coat, one open breast patch pocket, two lower patches with rounded flaps, a belted back, and center vent. The vest has four welt pockets, and instead of trousers, knickers. This was a golf suit.

In the 1920's and 1930's the company produced style guides which were distributed around the country to advertise the latest clothing, sumptuously illustrated with oil paintings done by noted painter Thomas Webb. Being a moderately heavy tweed, I started looking through the fall style guides but found nothing. Not being a golfer it never occurred to me that golf suits would be sold in the spring and not the fall. From the early 1920's I found several illustrations of the Sports Suit but the details were wrong. Two button fronts. Three buttons with squared off, button-through flaps. The 1926 book is not correct and I don't have the 1927 spring book, but there in the 1928 Spring Clothes For Men guide I found the exact suit. Of course, it could be later than 1928 but there is a small detail on one of the labels that suggests it would be no later than 1932. The company began using the term "Customized Clothes" in 1920 but registered it in 1932, thereafter it would be "Customized ® Clothes". The ® is missing from the inside breast pocket label.

Another small detail helps to narrow things down a bit. The company had a policy of only allowing Hickey Freeman garments to be sold and advertised in one retailer per city. Those cities which had sufficient population to support more than one retailer were then given the exact same garments but branded Walter Morton Clothes, a label created by joining the first names of the two sons of the founders, Walter B. D. Hicker and Morton J. Baum. This began in 1928. The Capper & Capper Chicago stores (of which there were 3) carried Walter Morton while the Detroit stores (also 3) sold Hickey Freeman branded merchandise. If this were a post-1928 garment it woudl have to have been sold in Detroit rather than Chicago. Nothing definitive but interesting.

Also perhaps interesting is that Capper & Capper is one of several retail stores which, along with F. R. Tripler of New York, became delinquent in their payments largely due to the great depression, and rather than force the companies into bankruptcy, Hickey Freeman invested capital in them to prop them up, and in 1933 the company gained a controlling interest in the stores. By the 1950's the company owned both retailers outright. Walter B. Duffy Hickey, the grandson of the founder and the son of the namesake of the Walter Morton label spent his college years working at one of the Chicago Capper & Capper stores, in 1960 and 1961.

We'll look closer at the construction in another post.

All Hands Are Not Equal

An interesting read, scanned from the Spring 1932 issue of Apparel Arts magazine

A piece of history

I just took over an office from someone who left Hickey Freeman. It was the office occupied by former designers and executives of the company and hadn't been cleaned out in, well, ages. It's in the corner of a suite of offices which have remained largely unchanged since they were built in 1912. I figured I might find some little treasures hidden in boxes, forgotten. I never thought I would find something that is so significant, at least in my mind.

There is a little side office adjoined to mine, in which there was a drafting table on which the designers would make their patterns, plus some shelves and two garment bags tucked behind the door. Behind the door and a stack of patterns I found this. This is a morning suit which was made for Walter B. D. Hickey (sr.) in 1929, six months before the market crash which caused the great depression. Mr. Hickey was the chairman of Hickey Freeman in the late sixties and judging by the date and size, it must have been made for him when he was a boy. His son, Mr. Hickey jr., now retired, was in last week for a visit- I will give him a call to see what he knows about this garment.

What is particularly exciting about this is the provenance and the condition. When looking at vintage garments we often have no idea for whom it was made, by whom, and when we do, there is often little information about them. In this case, not only do we know when it was made, for whom, exactly who that person is (and that person has a prominent place in the history of the clothing industry in America), but this garment was never worn. It is in mint condition. The silk lining in the sleeves has started to deteriorate a little, but the silk in the body is absolutely immaculate. I've never seen a garment of this age in this condition.

I'll post more photos when I get back from travelling next week, but in the meantime I'm going to reach out to a few people to consult with them on proper storage and what the best home for this would be. The costume institute, perhaps?

Spring 2013

I've been busy lately. You may have noticed.

I work for the company that makes Hickey Freeman and Hart Schaffner Marx, two venerable old clothing companies in the U.S. Hart Schaffner Marx was founded in 1887 and Hickey Freeman in 1899- there's an enormous amount of history in the two companies but like many old companies things needed to be freshened up a little. So over the last few years we have been hard at work updating the product, not least of which is the fit. The latest new things to go to market are in the Hart Schaffner Marx brand.

We have three core fits in the Hart Schaffner Marx line, two of which have been completely updated for Spring 2013, and a third one which has very limited distribution for this season and will see a wider rollout this fall. In all, with all the variations available for advance and custom orders I had about 140 new patterns to make. We will discuss the fits and elements of the suits on the company blog, but I thought readers might like a sneak preview of one of them.

Readers may be familiar with my own personal style of cutting, namely a clean chest, very little drape in the blade, a nicely suppressed waist, a higher armhole and a clean sleeve. The third core fit is all of these things, only cut a little shorter as this is part of our "fashion" offering as opposed to the more classic fits which are longer. I grabbed one of the fall samples which happen to be close to my size to shoot off a few pictures. It looks almost as good as something I might have spent hours and hours making myself by hand, which underscores the importance of fit. People tend to fetishize hand work in garments, but I always say fit should be priority number one.

Now, if these photos are any indication, I need to get some rest. I look tired!