Rose and Sam's Excellent Adventure

Howdy.

We’re in Hoi An, as you probably already know. And what’s Hoi An famous for? Their populous of 500 tailors. Good or bad? Good question.

As this is Vietnam, and the home of the “It’s ok, numbah one special price good quality new!” about 450 of those tailors will make you a sack out of strips of dried rat-shit and call it a suit and charge you $20 us for it.

Going on travellers reports and the recomendations left in the hotel guestbook, we decided on Peace Tailors and it seems to be for the better.

Went in there and told em I wanted a suit or two, and what I kind of style I was looking for (I backed this up with pointing to a suit in their catelogue). I went in about 2pm that day, and 10am the next I was wearing the suit for the first fitting.

The pants fitted perfectly and close inspection showed they were well stitched and the cashmere wool was defect free and felt good. The jacket was a bit too boxy though, and the sleeves were too long, so that afternoon, I was trying on the altered jacket and it was a fairly spotless slimfit ash coloured suit. Based on the power of that suit, I ordered the same suit, in a slightly patterned black.

Final products

• Two tailored, cashmere wool, silk lined suits.
• Two handmade (infront of my eyes), silk, skinny ties.
• Two extra pairs of pants.
• Four tailored French cuff’d shirts
• $500AUD

Rosie

• One tailored suit
• Two tailored shirts
• One tailored toggle jacket
• One tailored skirt
• $500

I’ll post some photos of the suits tonight. The linings have to be seen to be believed. Chris, you’ll cream lol.

Oh, and Papa, they have pockets ;) All over the shop including 4 inner lining pockets too! =) We read some reports of some dodgy tailors here as well which backed up your experience. Can you remember the name of the tailor you went to? I hear Impressions tailor are the fall apart tailors of Hoi An.

Our laptop shat itself the other day so I’m currecntly downloading an .iso image of the Linpus distro it came with and need to mount that to a USB drive as the lappy doesn’t have a CD rom. No problems with the data though, as per my amazing backup script, we have everything stored on the USB stick in the secret compartment in my watch. (watch curteousy of Chris. Spelling? No firefox here to fix my bad spelling…)

We’re thinking of heading to Da Nang and just flying to Hanoi to start the show as we’re both feeling like getting sorted out for teaching instead of spending any more cash on travel (for now) and spending it on getting setup in our place to choosing. It looks fairly likley we’ll head back down to Saigon to teach as there’s much more work down there, but that’ll be dependent on how much we like Hanoi.

Take it easy kids, and tell Rose to stop sending so many emails like a newb and use the blog.

Tags: clothing, Hoi An, tailor, Tailors, Vietnam, vietnamese

This entry was posted by Sam on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Hoi An, Tailors, Travel Stories, Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.