what does $95 worth of tailoring get you?
three perfect skirts and a lesson in letting go.
Happy weekend sweet peas. Some quick news:
SF Chronicle restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan wrote this article on being asked to leave the French Laundry, and it quickly became the center of local food scene *discourse.* It reads like an A24 gourmet-horror short film…my favorite bit was the description of her disguise, which featured “extra-large, celeb-off-duty sunglasses.” So if you’ve ever wanted to know what sunglasses a food critic should wear to stay incognito at a Michelin star restaurant, Fegan told me hers are from Steven Alan. This is what they look like in a different colorway.
I was nervous to make my first Japanese eBay order since the tariffs, but my recent order arrived smoothly and without any surprise fees. A few readers messaged me as well reporting their orders were delivered without a hitch—just keep it under $800 and you’ll probably be fine. I ordered a pair of $40 mint condition yellow Martiniano glove flats that were too good to pass up.
Are you interested in sponsoring a Molehill event in San Francisco? Fill out this form. I’d like to bring back the fragrance swap that sold out last fall!
In today’s newsletter, I bring you along into the tailor’s dressing room with me.
I had a pile of summer clothes (mostly skirts, let’s be real) that needed some alterations. So I stuffed them into a frayed Monterey Market grocery tote bag and brought them to my tailor, Thanh, who I trust with my most precious vintage pieces because she made my Uptown Girls birthday dress dream a reality.
Tailoring comes up a lot in the Substack fashion discussions, especially in the chats. Whenever someone chimes in with a fit conundrum, a helpful reader or two will offer advice, often recommending a trip to the tailor.
I think this is wonderful: tailoring is a skill that should be valued more in our society, and it unlocks major potential in your closet. However. I find that “tailoring” is often thrown around as a panacea for all our fit concerns (I am guilty of doing this too), as if it could magically fix every single little thing we find unsatisfactory about a $50 dress we ordered off eBay. When we talk about tailors as if they were fairy godmothers with wands (yes, sometimes they can pull off the seemingly impossible!), we run the risk of placing their profession on an idealized pedestal.
This can lead to unrealistic expectations of what a tailor can and cannot do.
This also skims over the very real experience of awkwardness or anxiety around body image/dysphoria that can be arise when someone is perceiving the size of your body relative to a piece of clothing!!! Getting clothes tailored is not always easy. In fact, it’s emotionally exhausting at times…even if you know it’s something you want to get done.
I am lucky to have developed a warm, trusting relationship with my tailor. I can tell she loves beautiful clothes, and wants her clients to feel the most beautiful girl in the room. But it was a process getting here. I spent months bringing low-stakes alteration jobs (pants hemming lol) to various local Bay Area shops until I found her. It’s like finding a therapist or dentist…you should try a few and figure out what makes someone the best fit for your needs.
So here’s to sharing realistic stories about tailoring, in all its highs and lows.
I brought a total of three skirts and one dress to the tailor. These were the fit problems, my ask, and the end result for each item.
My total bill was $95, which takes into account that every skirt I brought in was double-lined, and thus extra labor to tailor, as opposed to unlined skirts.
Item: Vivienne Tam Dark Floral Mesh Skirt
Fit Problem: Too loose in width, and too long. I ordered this on Poshmark and the tag says “2” but that doesn’t mean very much because Vivienne Tam mesh is something of a miracle material that can shrink and expand by enormous margins.
It is the stretchiest mesh I have ever come across, and I personally think it looks best when it pulls a wee bit across the hips to reveal a whisper of the butt shelf from the rearview. But there’s too much fabric here for me to achieve that effect, and it drags on the floor. Also, the waistband was totally stretched out from age, so the skirt would sag down my hips when I walked.
My Ask: Trim the excess length, take in the sides, and get the waistband functional again so there is more “hold” around the waist. My tailor said she could replace the interior elastic with a new one, but that it would be a thicker band, and I thought about it for a second and decided I didn’t like the idea of that. My imagination went to images of 2010s American Apparel skirts with the thick cummerbund waistbands and bumpy ruching…it just seemed aesthetically risky so we decided on sewing in a nifty little clasp system. It has notches placed one inch apart.
The Result: