Fifty-eight years at one bench
What has changed on Charoen Krung since 1968, and what has not.
The shop opened in 1968. Fifty-eight years is long enough for the street outside to have changed twice over, and long enough that a customer who came in for his first suit has sent his son. The bench has not moved.
People ask what is different now. Three things, and none of them is the sewing.
The customers changed first
In 1968 a suit was simply what you wore. A man had two, one for work and one for everything else, and they were replaced when they wore out rather than when they went out of style. Now a suit is a decision. Somebody has a wedding, an interview, a new job with a dress code, and they come in once, for one thing.
That changes what a first fitting is for. Most of it is not measuring. It is working out what the suit has to do, because a jacket for one outdoor wedding and a jacket for five days a week are not the same jacket and should not be cut from the same cloth.
The cloth changed second
The books are heavier on choice and lighter on weight than they used to be. There are 253 cloths on the shelf across five books: one wool blend at 270 g/m², three stretch blends at 360, and one book of two-ply cotton shirting at 100 to 150. Fifty years ago none of the suiting had any stretch in it at all, and nobody asked for it.
Stretch is the honest improvement. It does not make a suit better looking. It makes it survive being sat in, and most of a suit's life is spent sitting.
And the third is the tape
People used to come in three times: once to be measured, once for a basted fitting, once to collect. Plenty still do, and it is the way I would choose. But a customer in Chiang Mai can now measure at home, send thirteen numbers, and have the suit arrive. That was not possible in 1968 and it is genuinely useful.
What it costs is the basted fitting, where the jacket is still held together with loose white thread and can be taken apart and moved. If you can come in, come in.
What has not changed
The order of the work. Measure, cut, baste, fit, finish. The basting is the loose thread that holds a jacket together for its first fitting, and it exists so that the garment can still be undone. Almost everything about a bespoke suit that is worth paying for happens between the basting and the finish.
The alterations are still free, and they always were. A suit that no longer fits after a year has not failed; a body has changed, and there is cloth left in the seams for exactly that.
