I met Paul and his wife Moira last summer at a music festival outside of Salem, OR. They were visiting one of Paul's childhood friends, a friend of my partner Jim. Paul had recently proposed marriage, and they came out west to make the decision to move from Brooklyn to Portland. Paul told me that he was looking to have a suit custom made for their wedding and was having a hard time finding an eco fabric in charcoal with a narrow pin stripe that he wanted. After months of searching online and in stores I went to Paul and suggested that we consider making our own fabric for the suit; my experience in theater has exposed me to no end of detail work to get just the right fabric and I was sure this was the only option. First we discussed screen printing the stripes and having them bend into geometric patterns, similar to this picture I tore out of a magazine:
After more thought I felt that screen printing may look cheap and have spotty results and decided that sewing the pin stripes would give the most controlled results. Paul had a graphic designer friend of his work up some sample stripe patterns that we picked a few from and I made some samples of the patterns. We had multiple fittings for the muslin of the suit and did more rounds of samples, fine tuning the size of the stripe as well as the the thread color and placement of the accent colors in the stripes, this is our final sample:
All in all the suit is a great success and a continuation of the best work I have done to date.
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