starro
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2016
- Messages
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Asian Factory tailoring is not a pejorative in my book. In fact, there are more qualified tailors in China than anywhere else in the world. Interestingly, there are many Italian factories who's workforce is made up largely of Asian workers, but still using the "Made in Italy" tag. I think you will find that Asian factories generally are quite capable of making things to spec. In other words, if you want cheap, they'll do cheap. If you want hand made with all the bells and whistles, they'll do that too. No one seems to complain about their iPhone being poorly made, and anyone who has owned an Italian made car will probably have an opinion about the quality of manufacturing in Italy. I guess what I am getting at is that there is a really broad range within the term "Asian Factory Tailoring" and things aren't as black and white as they may seem.
*A pedantic side note: China is not a third world country. At the beginning of the Cold War, a French essayist wrote an article describing the planet in three worlds; the First World, which was the US and it's western allies, the Second World, which was the Soviet Bloc, China, Cuba, other communist countries, and the Third World, which was everybody else. "Third World" has taken on the connotation of any un/under-developed nation, but that is colloquial rather than the technical meaning.
With your permission I'm going to sidestep the semantics debate. I had to use a catch-all term and no umbrella is ever big enough for all. I just want to clarify that my point was not to denigrate anything, let alone an entire country's standards. I can even attack the sacred cow of MIUSA. Many Brooks Brothers MIUSA shirts and coats have sewing defects that are unworthy of the hypes of both BB and US production. So my point is that shoddiness and unreliability are the norm not the exception (in fact you'd have to pay a fair amount and do a lot of homework to be secure against them). Layer on top the fact that the seller has a contractual relationship with the factory, not ownership, and another source of unpredictability is introduced.
I'd personally be a little careful not to go over the top about the potentials of Chinese suitmaking (or European suitmaking, or American suitmaking). I'm sure they can get the outside handwork to look very pretty, but the overall make and especially internal construction are a couple of steps below the best hand-made. Dissection photos of suits from some highly-venerable labels show plenty of shoddiness: rough stitches, suboptimal types of stitching, things are glued when they really should be stitched.