Like any self-respecting tailor, Raja M. Daswani believes that clothes make the man. Unlike some of his competitors, however, Mr. Daswani believes that clothing can also drive the course of human events.
Take the dot-com boom. Indifferently dressed techies reset the business world’s dress code, unleashing a tidal wave of khaki that swamped investment banks and law firms alike. But the boom busted, in part, Mr. Daswani believes, because the techies dressed like slobs.
“The way to have discipline is to have disciplined clothes,” Mr. Daswani said. “People weren’t serious. They took everything for granted. They had kids in flip-flops and everything.”
Mr. Daswani, 47, from the Hong Kong district of Kowloon, would like to change all that. He wants American men to shed the rumpled chains of off-the-rack suits and embrace the glories of custom clothing. And so he flies to the United States – two, three, four times a year – and sets up shop in a hotel suite in New York, fitting customers and preaching his gospel.
“I would like to see more Americans dress well,” he said this month during his four-day stay. “When people buy a good suit, they are happier and feel good.”
He gestured to the swatches – pinstripes, houndstooths, solids – covering nearly every horizontal surface of his suite at the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan. “I’ve seen customers, when they wear sloppy suits, they act sloppy,” he said. “When they wear serious suits, they act serious. More aggressive!”
The tailor and his team of 10 assistants, including his son, see about 80 customers a day during their trips. Most are repeat customers. But as more conservative work attire has come back into vogue, Mr. Daswani has had a chance to reach new customers who might not have thought themselves the type to buy a custom-made suit.
To help them along, Mr. Daswani takes out advertisements in major newspapers, including this one. A recent ad proclaimed “a fitting end to the ill-fitting American suit.”
“Would you rather pay the same sum for a single, off-the-peg, chain store suit cut by a computer and sold to you by a spotty boy who thinks side vents are to be found on a Lambretta scooter,” it read, “or for two bespoke, custom-cut, hand-stitched suits, measured and sold to you by a man for whom suits are a lifetime’s passion?” He writes his own ads.
He is a sort of highbrow populist, a Michael Graves of men’s suits. To sell suits at the prices he does – a wool suit starts at $250 – Mr. Daswani relies on a mix of the old and the new. The components of his company, Raja Fashions, are, as he put it: “Italian fabrics. German machines. English tailoring. Chinese labor.”
