January 21, 2005
wired tailor
“English Cut”, the blog of my pal, Savile Row Tailor Thomas Mahon only went live a day or two ago and already it’s being talked about. Nice to see.
Just saw Tom Peters blogged it. Cool!
Yeah, I turned Thomas onto blogging and helped him set up the website. This is what I said in Tom Peters comment section:
Thomas’ business is interesting to me. It’s very “niche”, certainly, but the demand for bespoke English suits is fairly steady, but the supply of young tailors willing to endure a 7-year apprenticeship has been drying up over the last 50 years. Now the average age for a good English tailor (at Thomas’ level) is around 60.
So even if the market for bespoke is tiny, there’s only about 20 people IN THE WORLD who can cut an English suit at Thomas’s level. And a good portion of Thomas’ direct competition have never even sent an e-mail before, let alone started blogging. So once Thomas saw the possibilites of blogging, he jumped right at it.
Right now I have no financial involvement in Thomas’ blog or tailoring business.
Still, the idea of a “Wired” Savile Row tailor is such a no-brainer… it was just one of those things that came together over beers one evening.
[UPDATE:] The definition/explanation of the word “bespoke” is here.
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A wee chuckle to start your day off right etc.
I saw the mention on Tom Peters weblog and remembered that you were working with an upscale tailor; I figured it had to be your client.
The idea of a “Wired” Savile Row a no-brainer? Exactly! Just like the idea of a Wired GC!!
Taylor’s Weblog
Right that does it, I’m off to be a plumber (but without the pooey bits). Don’t you ever think, stuff it, I’d much rather be doing a physical trade thing. Creating something that you can look at and say,
Hugh, forgive my Yank ignorance, but what is the origin of the term “bespoke”? Google and wikipedia don’t have much and dictionary.com tells me what I already knew.
Tom, an definition/explanation of “bespoke” is here:
http://www.englishcut.com/archives/000004.html
I’ll also update this entry with the same info…
Years ago I looked this up, Tom. I wrote something somewhere on a newsgroup about the German usage of the prefix “be-” as compared with the English use of the prefix. Many times similar, sometimes not. You might start searching a little further back if interested in the language.
sprechen=speak
besprechen=discuss or agree upon something.
(past tense=besprochen)
Interesting to note that the the first hit I got on google when I tried to look that up again brought me to
Microsoft Natual Langauge Processing.
http://research.microsoft.com/nlp/
… keep working on that tricorder.