Never a size. Always you.
Five things we hold to, in a trade that mostly asks a woman to adjust herself to the garment.
A woman is not a size.
Ready-to-wear asks you to find yourself somewhere between an 8 and a 12, then pay a seamstress to argue with the difference. We think that is the wrong way round. Nothing we make begins as a size — it begins as your measurements, drafted into a pattern that exists for one body.
It means we cannot tell you what you are. We can only tell you what fits, which turns out to be the more useful thing.
Measured in the room. Designed wherever you like.
Fit cannot be guessed from a screen, so measurements are taken by hand at our Johannesburg, Pretoria or Cape Town studio — over twenty of them, along with posture and stance.
The design is yours to play with whenever it suits you. Build a suit, dress, blouse or coat in our online designers at midnight if that is when the idea arrives, and bring it to us finished.
Cloth you can live in, not just photograph in.
We buy from the mills that have been at it for a century or more — Italian wools and mohairs, British worsteds, French and Italian silks and crêpes, linen for the Highveld summer.
And we will tell you when a cloth is wrong for what you want, even when it is the more expensive one. A dress that photographs beautifully and creases across a three-hour lunch has not done its job.
Made to order. Nothing wasted.
We hold no stock and run no sales, because nothing exists until a woman has asked for it. Cloth is ordered per garment and offcuts go back into accessories.
There is no rail of unsold dresses here waiting to be marked down, and nothing is destroyed at the end of a season to protect a price.
Altered for as long as you own it.
Two fittings are included in every commission, and nothing leaves the studio until it is right on your body rather than on a mannequin.
After that, bodies change — pregnancy, training, years. Bring the garment back and minor alterations inside the original design cost nothing, for as long as it is yours. A dress you can keep wearing is the only kind worth making.
See how it is made
From the first idea to the last press — the eight stages of a TailorMe Woman commission.
How it works Our mission