My mother could tell what was wrong with a garment from across the room.
Not the fabric. Not the colour. She could see, from ten feet away, that the shoulder was fighting the woman wearing it, and she could tell you why, and she could put her hands on it and make it stop.
Her name was Teresa. She had an atelier in Baveno, on Lake Maggiore, and for forty years women came to her to be dressed. She had no education past her apprenticeship. She could not have written a word about the fashion industry. But she knew something that industry has spent a century forgetting, and she knew it in her fingers.
The woman is never the problem. The garment is.
I trained on Savile Row at nineteen. I have spent over thirty years since then in the fashion industry, luxury houses, premium labels, the high street, designing clothes and developing product. Between my mother's forty years and my over thirty, that is over seventy years and counting of hands-on cloth.
And I want to tell you what over seventy years of hands-on experience actually teaches you, because nobody in a shop is ever going to say it to your face.
It teaches you that for any one hip measurement, there are at least three genuinely different waists. Three real women, all the same size on paper, none of whom can wear the same trousers. I have measured over two thousand women, and it is true every single time.
It teaches you that when a garment does not sit right, there is always a reason, and the reason is in the pattern, in a decision someone made long before the cloth was cut, about a body that was not yours.
And it teaches you what a woman does in a fitting room when a garment fails her. I have watched it for a lifetime. She does not blame the garment. She turns to the mirror and begins the quiet inventory of everything she believes is wrong with herself.
That is the part I have never been able to accept.
Because I know, with my hands, not as an opinion, that she is standing there apologising for a mistake she did not make. The gap at the back of the waistband was decided in a room she has never entered, by people who never met her, using a chart drawn to a woman who does not exist.
My mother used to say it to every woman who came to her and started apologising for her own shape. And they nearly all did. They still do.
Il tuo corpo non sbaglia mai. È il vestito che sbaglia.
Your body is never wrong. The clothing is wrong.
She was not being kind. She was being accurate. That sentence is the whole of what over seventy years of hands knows.
So here is what I am doing, plainly.
I am writing down everything the cutting table taught me, the things the industry knows and does not say, the reason your clothes fail you, and the reason it was never your fault. Not theory. Not opinion. What I have seen with my own eyes, over and over, standing between a woman and a pattern and knowing the pattern was wrong
I am my mother's son. I carry her knowledge. And after over seventy years of it living only in our hands, I think it is time somebody said it out loud, to the women it was always about.
Start with your own proportion
I have put a short set of questions on my website — the same ones I would ask if you were standing in front of me at the cutting table. A few minutes, no measuring tape needed, and at the end you will understand your own waist-to-hip proportion, and why certain clothes have been failing you your whole life.
It is not a quiz about your style. It is about your architecture. Nobody has asked you these questions before, and no shop ever will.
Take the fit questions – and I will say only this about what comes next: I am building something that begins where those questions end. It is not ready yet. The women who are here early will know it exists before anyone else does.
