Traveller‘s tale: Custom-made errors

Over the past few weeks as I have been making the final preparations to move my family back to the USA, I have had the opportunity to reflect on the many things that I would miss about Malaysia — the people, the food, the hotel, family and friends.

Indeed, it is with mixed emotions that I am leaving. And while reflecting, I realised there’s another part of Malaysia I’d be leaving behind with mixed emotions: Clothing and tailors.

I say “mixed emotions” because one of the frustrating things about living in Kuala Lumpur is that nothing comes in my size. Here, I cannot buy shoes, shorts, pants, shirts, belts and most other everyday clothes. When I first arrived in 2003, my despair quickly deteriorated to the point where I would walk into a clothings store and ask: “Do you have ANYTHING in this store that can fit me?”

The salesperson would look at me up and down, shake his head, and lead me to the sunglasses rack! That was about it.

Then, about six months after I arrived, I was presented with a solution — a revelation, rather — a concept foreign to many foreigners: Custom tailoring.

My saviour came in the form of a pleasant young Chinese tailor named Jack who was recommended by the hotel concierge. And the best part about Jack was that his shop was in nearby Sungei Wang Plaza, which meant he could actually bring the fabric to the hotel where I worked and do the suit fittings in my office. This was a dream come true.

At our first meeting, Jack was quite surprised by my height and width and, if I recalled correctly, even made a few comments about possibly needing to charge me double due to the “extra fabric” that would be required to make me a suit. But he did his work with great detail, and took extra notes about my measurements. I was confident that I would have the perfect suit. And, as usual, that was when the confusion began.

My preliminary fitting of the un-finished suit revealed that everything was wrong. The jacket was too tight, the pants were too narrow, the sleeves were too short. I assumed it was just a small technical error and sent the suit back to Jack for corrections.

The second attempt at a fitting revealed that although some corrections had been made, everything was still too tight, too narrow and too short. Now I was confused. With all the detailed measurements, how could he get it wrong twice? Jack was also confused, as his measurements were very precise.

This was when I learnt a few things about custom tailoring. The first lesson is that the owner of the shop who does the actual measurements is not the tailor who does the cutting and stitching. The actual assembly of the suit is done by someone else, a tailor in a separate shop who translates the measurements that he is given into a finished product. And apparently, Jack’s tailor, the actual cutter, was getting something wrong. So Jack took out his phone and gave him a call.

An animated and heated exchange ensued in a dialect that I couldn’t understand. Jack paced around my office, making a “karate chop” motion with his free hand as he discussed the double-error with the tailor. And, with the traditional Malaysian telephone “goodbye” of: “ahh ahh ahh uhh (click)”, he had the answer.

Apparently, the tailor had been working with Jack for many years and, in his many years, he had never seen numbers like the ones submitted in the measurements for my suits. Jack explained that the tailor, after seeing the measurements, thought to himself “there’s no way any human can be that big”, and he assumed there was an error. So, to account for the obvious mistake, he scaled everything down to be about 10 per cent smaller. Even on the second attempt, the tailor assumed, “nope, no way, nobody’s that big” and re-submitted the suit with all the original measurements, this time scaled down by 5 per cent. I later learnt that Jack had to eventually send the tailor a picture of me, a rare sighting of the Western giant captured on film, to finally satisfy him that the submitted measurements were indeed accurate.

The third fitting was a charm and, for the next nine years, Jack was my tailor, for everything from suits to shirts to pants. Send me a tweet @SteveCokkinias if you want his number.
Farewell Malaysia! Jumpa Lagi! I look forward to seeing everyone again when I am back in Kuala Lumpur later this year.

 

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