The greatest privilege of my life has been the gift of my daughter. However, not far behind that is the privilege of being able to have served all of you over the last 16 years.
You blink. It’s right there. You just blink and you see back to the beginning, but when I do it seems to be almost an aerial view, as though I was witnessing a story, irrespective of whether it was my own.
I can recall having the wedding of a girl I knew, her name was Tanya, and I was busy getting my first bespoke velvet dinner jacket made at a tailor named Rochefort in the City of Sydney. I had enquired about bow ties then. Soon after I began making them. I remember that by the time I made a jacket with a then young Carl Sciarra that I was piping bow ties and piping the shawl of my dinner jacket. I lined it with a silk polka dot. It was far more pedestrian then. The Chinese custom-made suit factories were in their infancy. People like Patrick Johnson did not exist, they all came later. I loved working with people like Carl. And people like Nick Valentini who ran a suit workroom out on Parramatta Road. He had a tailor with him, blue eyes, shiny ones, glistening almost, his name was Frank. Frank would show me tricks of the trade like how to hand sew in a straight line or press a shoulder. In those days I tried to make money from selling suits, but the process was cumbersome, and the customers were always dissatisfied so I focused on that which I had more control over, silks and turning them into bow ties and accessories.
Fast forward 16 years and I have recently tied 250 bow ties between a few private label orders, I’ve been shipping them all around the world these past weeks and I have entertained quite a few gentlemen and occasionally their brides to be in the Studio. I have made a few perfumes, sprayed so many of them onto visitors in between playing with silks. They always love coming past because it’s not a traditional retail store, it is an experience and an exchange. It has given me so much pleasure to be able to offer that as opposed to the traditional sales assistant asking if you needed help and then possessing not the slightest bit of knowledge about the product and reading the label at the same time that you did.
I wish I could have offered the same service and experience digitally over the phone, but we did what we could with the tools we had at hand.
My studio has become a place where sometimes people pop in not to buy anything but just to hang and watch me cut silk or else to divert me away for a coffee. So, it’s not uncommon for me to be seen next door having a coffee in the mid-morning.
In the eleven years I have been cutting silk from the Studio I always kept cloth and paintings in the windows to cover it all up. It has made people speculate whether it was a nefarious business front or as the famous French chef Guillaume Brahimi once said to me “it looks like it could be a brothel” – well thanks Guillaume.
Concurrently whilst I have been trying to perfect the bow tie over that time the world has substantially changed. Sydney is now overrun with made to measure tailors using Chinese and occasionally Italian factories and I don’t know of more than three tailors still in operation locally. That makes me sad. China, I would like to begrudge them if I could, but frankly they ate our local industry alive. They were clever, they worked harder, they collectivised better. They just ran circles around everyone else, the Italians included, if not especially.
In that same period the bow tie outside of black tie and weddings became defunct as men turned away from collars and headed for more relaxed tailoring and often eschewing tailoring entirely.
Though today we offer so many other products, it remains to be seen that any of the additional lines we offer will usurp that initial interest we sparked when we set out to make the best self-tying bow ties in the world.
Did we get there? I guess you guys answered that with your testimonials, with your gifts that you sent from all over Australia and the world in some instances. Vodka from Idaho, perfume from Dubai, Rum from Florida and many many other gifts which I hold dear.
Today I am writing to let you know that I am winding it all down starting today. Although I have not failed in the experience and its success, I have failed to make it into the kind of business that was saleable to the next person, and I have failed to make it financially successful enough to sustain my needs moving forward.
Whilst I would love to groom someone to take it over, I fear the specific skills set across many different disciplines from design creativity, web development, marketing, copy, pattern making and cutting and sewing would preclude too many people from wanting to take over such a business. You really have to wear a lot of hats.
The other day I sat with my lawyer revising my last will and testament. As she said to me my directions to my trustees about where and how my daughter should spread my ashes (North Bondi and Kastellorizo) my eyes began to well up as I contemplated my own extinction. She seemed to get a little emotional herself. Then later that evening, by sheer coincidence, I was speaking to a lovely lady that I find extra stimulating and she was telling me a funny story about the spreading of her grandparents’ ashes. And in that story the ashes never quite made it over the boat and blew everywhere and then later someone mistook the remaining ashes to be some form of drugs in a glad bag and they threw them in the bin. I was practically crying with laughter. And in that moment, something really resonated with me, that shortly after we are gone, nobody cares, and the world moves on. The idea that we leave any great legacy or that anyone should remember us for the longest time is not particularly true for most. If you are lucky a few will spare a fond thought of you.
And it’s on this note that I want to say that as I begin to wind down the business that I do not delude myself that you will remember it for very long. You will read this email, many of you will have already read enough, and you will think little of it. But I did want to say that it’s my belief that the bow ties will stand. And they will if you look after them, stay with you your whole life. And, I hope, if I have done my job correctly, that their limited numbers will make them collectors’ items.
Yesterday I visited my friend, we have an ice bath together a couple of times a week. When I arrived at his house yesterday, I noticed that they had framed a silk scarf that I had drawn on the wall of their dining room, it was the focal point, for the time being. I was so chuffed. You don’t know how much it meant to me. All is not in vain when you see something like this. That it’s loved enough to become art in someone’s living room. Everything I did, from the start, was to create art, it’s just that I wanted it to hang around your neck.
With love and talk soon.
Nicholas.