Summer is HERE!

With the change in seasons I can’t help but get a spring in my step as the days grow longer and warmer. Alas this spring is usually employed to traipse up and down the studio between the sewing machines and the iron. Eish my life.

This is what my fingers look like right now

The good news is that things are getting better by the day, with more business than I can handle even with Refilwe’s help. The bad news is that this leaves precious little time for my personal creative endeavours 😥

I used to have enough time to do this!!

Given the necessity of making money and pleasing clients, I’ve decided to focus this season’s collection down to fewer garments (possibly just one). And since I might only be doing a single jacket this season, I thought I’d give it a darn good go.

Breath-ability

One thing that really caught my attention in Japan was the season-appropriateness of all their clothes. It’s true their climate demands this far more than ours, but it is also a testament to the Japanese way of close attention to detail. A beautiful innovation I saw while checking out people’s clothes (sometimes at less-than-appropriate distances) was a semi lined jacket worn by almost everyone in a suit.

While the semi-lined suit is no innovation to fashion, it has a reputation (here) of being second grade to the full lining. Yet with the perfection of Japanese tailoring I actually didn’t even notice the suits were semi-lined for a few days, until in one of those movie-like moments a breeze flipped open one guy’s jacket.

So there it is, the challenge for this season: to create a Saccaggi version of the unlined suit which will allow breath-ability as well as head-turning style to the wearer.

This is where we’re at at the moment

I’m also entirely re-thinking how the chest piece of a suit works, as if I didn’t have enough to do these days…

My apologies in advance for denying you more designs, but if I slept any less I’d actually die!

For more behind-the-scenes madness go here