A Tailored Dress in Hanoi

As many of you know, I learned to sew when I was about 10, hemming my very first dress for the 4-H fair while sitting on the floor in the TV room as we anxiously watched Mary Lou Retton prepare for her final vault in the ’84 Olympics.

Since then I’ve made a lot of clothes (but not so many since I got into the advertising business for lack of time). Regardless, I’ve become somewhat of a fabric packrat because I have all these great ideas and buy the fabric for them but never get around to sewing them up.

So you can imagine that I’ve been in pure heaven in Vietnam, where tailors are literally everywhere, propositioning you on the street to make you a nice wardrobe in the course of an afternoon. Truly, 5 hours and you can have an entire wardrobe. It’s insane! I love it because I can be the designer and don’t have to do all the tedious work.

Hoi An is the town that’s famous for its tailors. However, we were spending more time in Hanoi, and I didn’t realize at the outset of the trip that they can literally do several pieces in an afternoon. So I decided to have it done in Hanoi.

I’d been thinking about having a dress made for several months before we departed for our trip, but I hadn’t put it to paper. I figured I’d buy a bunch of fashion magazines for the long plane ride and then sketch something up. Finally in our Hong Kong hotel room I sat down to look through Elle and Lucky to find inspiration. I knew I wanted a wrap dress, in the vein of my beloved “Foofenstein,” but I decided to give it an Asian twist. I found this dress in Elle by Alexander McQueen:

I decided to go with that neckline, then do slightly-longer-than-cap sleeves, then add a bit of detail to continue the diagonal motif of the wrap. Here is my sketch:

On our second day in Hanoi we hit Hang Gai Street, which is known as Silk Street because of all the silk shops. One after another. Most had ready-made clothes, but many would do custom work. The guide book suggested two different ones, and upon finding the first one, they said it would take 10 days. Too long. The second one was just across the street, but it looked to have become purely a retail shop for yoga clothes.

So we headed back around the corner to a place that we’d poked into earlier to take a gamble. It was one of the more upscale places, but hey, we’re in Vietnam – how expensive can it possible get? When we’d been in the shop the first time, Derek noticed a poster-size photo of Hillary Clinton with what appeared to be the shop owner.

“Do you think that’s really Hillary?” he asked, pointing up to the picture?

“Looks like Photoshop to me,” I said. It wasn’t a great photo, and it looked like she’d been cut out from another photo and plopped on there.

At any rate, we returned to the shop, and a very nice tiny little bit of a thing immediately came up asking if she could help us. I explained that I had an idea for a dress and wondered if they could do it in 48 hours. I showed her the picture of the McQueen dress from Elle, then showed her my sketch and explained exactly what I was thinking. Then she led me over to a stack of folded cashmere suiting fabrics and we started looking for “the one.”

Ultimately I picked a khaki fabric with a faint stripe. She quoted me a price — $180 – which I thought was high, but I acquiesced (in hindsight this was a mistake) and off we went across the room to take measurements.

They measured extensively – I think they could’ve made a body double.

Then we went over the details of the dress again. She went around the store (which had a lot of ready-made dresses for sale) to find examples of the wrap, the neckline, then sleeve and the width of the belt. We changed a few of the details for the dress, too, based on the fabric and the amount of difficulty – namely getting rid of the triangular panel on the left side as you look at the dress. I also found a sleeve that I liked better on another dress.

At that point the consultation was complete. She led me over to the counter to pay. As I was waiting for them to run my card, I looked up and saw this:

Eeeeeek! Another picture of Hillary, and my neckline was exactly the same! Oh dear! I’m turning into a frumpmeister! This picture was clearly not a Photoshop miracle – it was real. Turns out she had visited the shop in 2000.

Two nights later we returned to the shop at 6:00 p.m. to pick up the dress. They were done – they hadn’t had time to press it, so it wasn’t in peak form. Nevertheless I tried it on, and it fit really well. And it turned out almost exactly as I had envisioned it. There are only two things that I would’ve changed: (1) the tie is a little too much on my actual side. I was thinking it would be on the side but in the front. (2) I had them do a diagonal cut on the corner of the skirt. I’m not sure if it’s going to hang right, but I also know that I can easily fix it.

So here’s the bummer – I don’t have a picture of it to show you! It was kind of in a wad from not yet being pressed, and we’ve now shipped it home. So you’ll just have to wait until January!

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