The building sits on a hill above the river, and for the first hour of the morning the light comes in sideways through windows that have not been cleaned since the eighties. Nobody wants them cleaned. The light is the point.
Downstairs is cutting and pressing. Upstairs is sewing, eleven machines, most of them older than the people at them. The cutting table is a single slab of beech that was here when the family bought the place in 1974.
We make roughly four hundred pieces a month here. It would be cheaper almost anywhere else, and the answer to why we do not is on the second floor, in the difference between a shoulder seam sewn by someone who has done it for thirty years and one sewn by someone who has not.
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