Where Have all the Tailors Gone? Interviews with Four Miami-Based Tailors

“Everybody wants to be a designer now.”

Mario Vita (Photograph: Pedro Lollett)

Angie Vita is the wife and business partner of Mario Vita, a well-known Italian tailor who has had his shop for 35 years in Surfside’s Harding Avenue. Verdiles Custom Shop caters to Bal Harbour Shops and Miami Design District luxury businesses like Saks, Gucci, Stella McCartney, Ralph Lauren, Loro Piana, and Hermès.

Mario the Tailor, as his clientele knows him, also caters to customers who have learned about him through word of mouth. Their parents and grandparents had suits made by him, although he only does alterations now. “I’m too old,” he says, with a sad smile on his face.

It seems that nostalgia goes hand in hand with being a tailor in Miami. Almost all of the subjects interviewed for this piece were consistently sentimental when discussing their work and legacy. Like Vita, most of them say there is no one to replace them when they retire and that there is a shortage of talent when they need to hire new staff. As Vita’s wife notes, “it is more fashionable to be a designer than a tailor.”

Angie Vita is not the first to utter these beliefs. Journalists have coined the term “The Project Runway Effect” [1] to refer to this phenomenon. Young creative people are attracted to the role of the passionate and creative fashion designer who drafts beautiful garments and takes bows after their runway show’s grand finale.

But the shortage of tailors in the area cannot be solely attributed to millennials and Gen Z, with their dreams of quick success. Other factors like the transformation of the job market post-2008, the rise of freelancing, and the casualization of fashion are just as influential.

With fewer men having to wear suits daily—even fewer now with the pandemic—the services of a tailor are much less required, rendering tailoring a less attractive path for apprentices. And once cities like Miami run out of tailors, where will all the suited misfits go?

Maximo Paulino (Photograph: Pedro Lollett)

The Master Tailor

Maximo Paulino is Master Tailor at the Ermenegildo Zegna store in Miami’s Design District. He is a tall, slim man with dark skin and bright white hair, sharply groomed. Kind and boasting impeccable manners, he was about to turn 65 when we sat down to speak in 2019. Paulino has been working with the Italian brand for nearly 24 years and is responsible for training all tailors that work for Zegna in the United States in a program created to maintain high standards of quality across all of the stores in the country. At the time of our discussion, he had just returned from New York City, where he was training new team members. He says these workers are never younger than 50 years old. 

“I think young people are just not educated on what this trade can do for their lives, because you can make a good living out of it, support your family.” Paulino has been working as a tailor since he was 16 in his native Dominican Republic. He began in this line of work because he couldn’t find pants that would fit his very long legs—they were all too short or too wide at the hips. He began altering them himself and was soon making them from scratch. 

After learning how to master pant-making, he started making striped bell-bottoms for his friends at school. He clarifies that there is no need to excuse him—this was 1970. 

He left the island in 1981, “before things started to get really tough.” The eighties were times of crisis for many Latin American countries, and the Dominican Republic was no exception. “Most [...] remember the strikes, looting, and deaths that occurred after Easter in 1984, which [were caused by] the price increase of gas, electricity and the overall basket of goods, in turn raising living expenses for Dominicans, thus reducing the purchasing power of the worker's salary,” recalled Diana Castaños Guzmán de Martínez, lawyer, banking specialist, and researcher, during her conference presentation “The 80’s: A lost decade in Latin America, the Dominican case” [2].

In Miami, Paulino opened a shop for bespoke suits, but the business was not profitable after two years, so he looked for employment elsewhere. That’s how he started working for Zegna. By then, he was fully proficient in the art of suit making, but his job would consist only of alterations from then on.

Training to be a tailor doesn’t take that long, Paulino says; “a year if you know nothing about the trade.” He should know: he has been training tailors for the Italian giant for three years. But young people don’t seem to be interested in learning, Paulino thinks.

“Those salesmen, they don’t care. They want to make money. They don’t care about their customer. For me, the first thing is the customer, because the customer is your life. You do a bad job, and you have no more customers.”

John Khouri (Photograph: Pedro Lollett)

Last Man Standing

John Khouri, the owner of John the Tailor, a shop established in 1981 in South Miami, was 14 years old when he made his first suit in Lebanon. “I used to sew at my house with my grandma. I love it. [It’s] in my blood.” He apprenticed with his uncle until he was 22, but the Lebanese Civil War broke out and he moved to the United States with his wife.

Khouri is very nostalgic about Lebanon. He is the oldest of 10 children and the first among them to leave the country. When the war began, he was determined to bring his siblings to America with his tailoring salary. “One by one. It took me 17 years. I [brought] them, all of them, and I spent everything on them. I used to work double shifts so I could bring everybody.”

He first landed in Buffalo, New York, where he worked with a company from 1973 to 1979. “I used to make Johnny Carson’s suits over there, my cousin and me. Then I opened my shop in Sunset and 57th Court. The whole thing has been about 38 years in South Miami.”

Khouri is one of the few tailors still making bespoke suits in town. “My main thing is custom-made suits, and I do alterations on the side for my other clients. But men, they don’t dress like before. In the eighties, nineties, men used to dress a lot. I used to make a lot of clothes. I used to have 22 tailors, four shops. Then I close[d] everything. I end[ed] up with one shop and four tailors.”

According to Khouri, who is now 68, most stores hate him for telling his clients to return their newly purchased suits because they were poorly made. “Those salesmen, they don’t care. They want to make money. They don’t care about their customer. For me, the first thing is the customer, because the customer is your life. You do a bad job, and you have no more customers. My garments stay at least 15 years, 20 years. I have clothes I made about 40 years ago. I still wear them.” 

But the problem for Khouri isn’t just the casualization of fashion or the big stores creating cheaper, disposable suits: it’s the lack of tailors in the area. “No more tailors. To be honest with you, no more good tailors.” According to Khouri, if his tailors—all over 70—were to leave or die, like the five who recently passed away, he would be in deep trouble. He doesn’t have the patience to train new ones, and talent is tough to find.

“Nobody wants to work with their hands here,” Khouri says, leveling blame on new generations for the death of his trade. “You sit in your house, and you work on your computers, you make money. You don’t want to sit down on the chair and sew on the machine. This is art. This is the best thing you do in your life. It’s so nice and clean.” 

Khouri is indifferent about the competition posed by designer brands and is confident nobody can fit a suit as he can. Once people have one suit made by him, there’s no way they will go anywhere else. 

His customers are mainly millionaires who can afford his prices and people with special conditions: “customers who are short, or heavy, and the ones who have the money,” as he puts it. That list includes many of the Miami Heat’s basketball players; photos of men like Alonzo Mourning cover Khouri’s walls. “He has about 1,000 suits. All I've made. He had 1,500 pants and shorts. I make them all.” 

A Family Business

Photograph: Pedro Lollett

Mario Vita’s story began 65 years ago when he was 10 years old in a small town in Italy called Cassino. He went to school in the morning, and in the afternoon he would learn how to sew. 

When he turned 18, he left home to go to Switzerland, and later Canada, where he spent 19 years working with his brother, also a tailor. It was there that he met Angie, his wife and partner. “I tell my wife, either we go back to Italy, or we move to Florida.” He was tired of the weather in Montreal. “Thirty-eight years,” Angie says. “Thirty-eight years, in this place,” he confirms. 

The last custom-made suit Mario made was eight years ago, and both Angie and Mario remember the man and the suit well. “The poor guy was waiting like two, three years for that suit,” Angie says. Mario explains it took him so long because he had a lot of alteration work from the designer shops and department stores.

“And he says, ‘I’m not going to go back to New York until you make my suit.’ I think that was his last suit too,” Angie says. “He was an old man.” 

Mario looks nostalgic, again. “Poor guy. I hope he’s alive.”

Mario has about $100,000 worth of fabric left over from the time he made bespoke suits—not surprising, considering he spent 54 years creating them from scratch. He enjoys having his fabrics on display in his house and shop, saying it gives him pleasure to look at them. He can’t sell them anyway, he says. There are no tailors to sell them to.

One could argue that Mario is guilty of aiding tailoring’s demise: his son asked to be trained by him, but Mario only taught him to do alterations. There was so much work coming in for bringing up hems, tapering sleeves, and so few people asking for bespoke suits, that it only made sense for Mario to do it this way.

“These days, everything is done in the third world countries. Places [where] they pay as [little] as $.08 an hour. Here we pay $30/35 an hour and can’t find a good tailor. But the alteration, they cannot send them back for that. They have to be done here. Either they like it or not. That’s where my work comes in because they cannot send it back. And thank God. I’m busier. Look at this guy. He brought 14 shirts.” Mario points to a pile of shirts brought in by a client for alterations.

“I want to step away from that, and I want to make tailoring sexy and fun and feel approachable. Educate consumers about fixing what they have. Buying quality, and having it fit right.”

 “It’s too bad it’s a dying trade,” Mario says as if this is a fact, the death of the tailor. “The good tailors, they’re almost all dead. I’m the only one alive. And too bad that they don’t learn, because I can’t complain. I make a good living, and I think I did very well over my life, you know. And I love it. Yesterday was a day I stayed home [“And he was sick!” Angie adds, mid-sentence], and I feel I didn’t like it. I like to stay [in the shop], because you talk with people, you try on, you put pin in. You stay home, what are you going to do? Watch TV? How much TV can you watch?” [Author’s note: Mario, you’d be amazed.]

 “It’s a good trade,” Mario continues, “but also it’s a very dedicated one. You have to want to learn. That’s what the young today... they don’t… They want right away the money [sic]. But you have to sacrifice a little bit to learn because it’s a lot to learn. Very, very much.”

Now, when customers ask for something custom-made, he tells them to go to the mall, buy something that they think fits pretty decently, and come back and “we’ll see.” 

“He makes it look custom made,” Angie says.

Ashley Liemer (Photograph: Pedro Lollett)

It’s a man’s world

Ashley Liemer breaks all the stereotypes surrounding the image of the tailor: she is young, she is a woman, and she is American. 

The Tailor House, her store in the Design District that opened in December 2018, caters to many of the neighborhood’s luxury houses: Louis Vuitton, Versace, Pucci, Valentino, and Prada are among her clients. Dior asked her to clear her schedule for this year’s Art Basel, so she can jump on any alteration work that comes from tourist shoppers that travel just for that week.

“The intention was to feel as if you were walking into Prada or Valentino and you’re shopping,” Liemer says about the copper and velvet interiors of The Tailor House. “Typically, when you’re getting things altered and tailored, you’re going into a dry cleaner—which I’m too familiar with” (she learned most of her trade by working in the back of a dry cleaner in her twenties). 

“I want to step away from that, and I want to make tailoring sexy and fun and feel approachable. Educate consumers about fixing what they have. Buying quality, and having it fit right.” She thinks some people don’t even know that they can fix their clothes or shop in their closets and repurpose what they already own. “There’s a notion of this circular economy with fashion now: reuse, repurpose, find it again, rather than just always buying new and throwing away. So for me, this concept is more—yes, it’s tailoring, but it’s sustainable fashion. It’s like the new type of sustainable retail.”

After going to business school, Liemer worked in the family business, a mortgage lending company, while figuring things out. Figuring things out included a long-distance mentor-mentee relationship with Mika Inatome, her wedding dress designer, and working in sweatshops across Miami. “I did the lowest of low jobs where you’d show up, and you’d get a little table, and they’d give you a list of crystals, patterns to embezzle on jeans. Then they paid you cash under the table when you left. You clock in, and there was an envelope with like $30 for the day, those type of situations.” 

She was around 23 when she applied to an ad on Craigslist that read: “Urgent. Tailor passed away. Need somebody.” When the owner saw Ashley, she was stunned, “Wait. You? I've never seen a tailor so young.” Ashley was hired on the spot. 

Liemer got in touch with her husband’s family tailor to apprentice with him on Sundays. “Mario [Argiro] was this guy who had an old Italian shop for very formal menswear.” Argiro had never heard of such a young person interested in learning his trade, so he said yes.

The sudden nature of Ashley’s predecessor’s death meant that, when she turned up for her first shift, all of his tools, supplies, and piles of unaltered garments were waiting for her. “I think I started, and there were over 100 bags of things that needed tailoring. That night, I went home and watched every YouTube video and ordered every book on alterations.”

After eight months of driving to Fort Lauderdale to learn how to alter the most complex cases, Liemer felt fully proficient in the art of tailoring and garment construction. 

She worked at Mark’s Cleaners for nine years until she opened The Tailor House. During that time, her business grew. She created Noble Uniforms, a company that designs and manufactures fashion uniforms for hospitality, and Billie Blooms, a children’s line, all inside the dry cleaners. She felt it was necessary to move out of the dry cleaners and create this expensive-looking concept store because it would never evolve much more from where they were. 

“Maybe if we were in New York or another city with people that were a little bit more open-minded to something cool and funky. But there was this lack of respect for different types of industries and the people working in them. I would be out with my husband socially in Miami Beach, and we’d run into some person he grew up with, and they’d be like: ‘And how is it going… Are you still working in the dry cleaner?’ And I would be like, ‘Yep. Still working in the dry cleaner. Just working on your dirty clothes, exactly what I’m still doing. I also just did all of the Brightline train uniforms and just opened the first Virgin Hotel in Chicago, and I also do all the Soho House uniforms. But yeah, still working in the dry cleaner.”

“A master tailor today is hard to find. (…) I recently checked out the thirteen ‘tailors’ in a city of 500,000. Not a single one of them knows how to make a suit! They all have signs that proclaim ‘fine custom tailoring’ or the like, but these men are salesmen, not tailors.” Jane Rhinehart raised this complaint in her book How to Make Men's Clothes, published in April 1975 [3].

The concern that tailoring is a dying art is far from new. Rhinehart argued not only that tailors were increasingly older, but that the customer was about to lose interest in their service by collectively forgetting the value of their work: “People must be acquainted with quality tailoring before they will pay for it. If you have never seen a beautifully custom-tailored coat, how can you desire one?”

We may be reaching a point when cities like Miami have no tailors to make a bespoke suit. Thanks to places like The Tailor House, and tailors like Mario Vita, who insist not on making the suit from scratch but on fine alterations, misfits are safe to fix their ready-made pants and jackets, be it from Zegna or Men's Wearhouse. But what will happen to the tailor's trade in the post-Project Runway era, when younger generations appear to have no interest in mastering the skill? Will it pass out of fashion forever, or can it be revived, like those seventies bell-bottoms that never really go away? Only time will tell.

Note: This piece is excerpted from Where Have All the Tailors Gone? Account of the Transformation of the Tailoring Industry, with a Focus in the Miami Dade County Area in 2019, a dissertation submitted to Istituto Marangoni Miami in fulfillment of the requirements for the MA Luxury Brand Management.

Update: Since the dissertation was submitted in 2020, Maximo Paulino left Ermenegildo Zegna for a similar post at the Italian menswear brand ISAIA, and Ashley Liemer's Tailor House moved from its Design District location to a larger space in Little River.

NOTES

[1] Amed, I. a.-P. (2017, September 28). Is Fashion Education Selling a False Dream? Retrieved from Business of Fashion : https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/education/global-fashion-school-rankings-2015

[2] Pereyra, E. (2018, August 7). Diario Libre. Retrieved from Diario Libre: https://www.diariolibre.com/economia/republica-dominicana-padecio-crisis-economicas-en-la-decada-perdida-CE10508318

[3] Rhinehart, J. (1975). How to Make Men's Clothes. London: Mills & Boon Limited.