Singapore's heritage tailors seek new suitors

Straits Times

3 days ago

Master tailor Chung Chi Kwong, founder of Meiko Tailor, and his daughter Adele Chung, founder of Uncommon Hem by Meiko Tailor, at their new atelier in Boat Quay. ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
SINGAPORE – The new outpost of 48-year-old business Meiko Tailor gives the lie to fusty notions of old-school tailoring.
Entering the space at Boat Quay that opened in June, one sees the big window looking out on the river, wood flooring, trendy furniture with round edges and a bean-shaped settee 'for conversation', says heir apparent Adele Chung.
The 49-year-old former marketing communications professional is behind the modish feel of the place. It is unusual on two counts: as an expansion and as a play for the women's market.
For peers of Meiko Tailor's founder Chung Chi Kwong, 76, who still keep their own tailoring shops, downsizing and moving to cheaper addresses are more familiar arcs.
The menswear specialists tend to be chary of the saturated women's market too. But three in 10 Meiko clients are women, says Ms Chung, who joined her father's business in 2018.
About half the shop floor is devoted to made-to-measure samples of women's clothes, under a new sub-label designed by Ms Chung, who dares to mix prints and fabrics, and brighten classic garments with non-standard colours. A case in point: a periwinkle blue double-breasted blazer.
Named Uncommon Hem, the line is fashioned from surplus luxury fabrics and also comes in a men's range.
Yet the quirky, casual offerings do not displace its cornerstone – the bespoke suits. They are still cut by Mr Chung, then canvassed and stitched by hand, right down to the internal padding. 'We are very traditional here,' says Ms Chung.
This tension between the old ways and new tastes is at the heart of Singapore's legacy tailoring scene. As its veteran players mark grand anniversaries this SG60 – most with 40 years to their names – they reach a critical point in succession, but are at odds on how much to change.
Tailoring's glory days
On the occasion of their 145th anniversary, the old guard of elite local tailoring find their numbers much reduced.
The Singapore Master Tailors Association estimates that there were up to 5,000 tailors here in the decade before ready-made apparel took off in the 1980s. Now, it puts the figure at 1,000 – shrunken but still kicking.
Says the group's chairman Eric Chia: 'As long as you want a suit that fits, you need a tailor because every body is different.'
The association – a chapter of the World Federation of Master Tailors – once had 500 members at its peak in the 1970s, says a sharp-suited Mr Chia. Now, they are 47, with an average age of 60.
But even with no new blood since their youngest recruits – two millennials who joined six and eight years ago – the ageing clothiers sense they must discriminate.
Gone are the days when a tailor had to be Chinese, referred by a member and pass an in-person 'practical' judged by a panel of five to 10 masters to enter the ranks. Yet, novices looking to turn a buck on shoddy cutting, drafting, sewing or quality control are still duly rebuffed.
From their modest base in a Geylang walk-up, the group of menswear specialists holds the line on 20th-century standards.
The place is a record of past glory. In the corner is a cabinet of trophies from decades of international contests and on the walls are newspaper clippings.
The old hands behind the loot say they know their skills are valued, more so post-pandemic, when local clientele grew to fill some of the orders once fed by expatriates that Covid-19 repatriated.
The encouraging trend is spurred on by a fitness craze that has produced more beefy men who strain at standard sizing, and a pool of bankers and menswear heads who rail against nosediving corporate dress codes.
Trouble is, says 60-year-old tailor Betty Fong, these young men coming in speak a different language.
They can throw such disarming questions as 'what is the difference between hair canvassing and fusing?', she says, chalking it up to the internet's store of jargon. 'I can't even answer because the terms they use are different from us. When I try to explain, they don't get it either.'
It is an issue of milieu, one that old-timers here approach at different tilts and with uneven success.
When old meets new
Modernisation can be a long game for this craft-centred trade.
Leading the pack is the biggest and oldest name in heritage tailoring, CYC Tailor, which turns 90 in 2025.
Its third-generation boss Fong Loo Fern, 71, ditched the heavy interiors of the traditional shop as early as 2003, going for a bright, airy studio look at its former Raffles Hotel flagship.
CYC Tailor's third-generation boss Fong Loo Fern ditched the heavy interiors of the traditional shop as early as 2003, going for a bright, airy studio look at its former Raffles Hotel flagship.
ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
Mrs Fong gestures to the open vibe of the brand's current Capitol store, owing to the large floor space, and the white lighting assuring shoppers of their fabrics' true colour. It is all by design, she says. 'I like to surprise people.'
The real coup might be CYC's branding, simultaneously leaning into the high luxury of bespoke suiting, while also selling ready-to-wear T-shirts.
Its apex product, the custom suit, ranges from $1,300 to $12,000 for a Holland & Sherry fabric woven with 22-karat gold. It is one of 6,000 textile options, from mills like Belgium's Scabal and the rarer Standeven from Britain.
The $39 fully cotton tees are a bestseller. Gurkha pants, outerwear, casual and dressy shirts also come ready-made.
Granddaughter of founder Chiang Yick Ching, Mrs Fong made savvy moves upon taking over the family firm in 1992, when sales of the off-the-rack shirts it had become known for were in the pits.
Then, the former business analyst had introduced an electronic point-of-sale system and computerised customer records in line with a renewed focus on pedigree tailoring.
It would be years before the brand gained cachet as Mr Lee Kuan Yew's shirtmaker. It was a story Mrs Fong sought permission to take to the press in 2001 when the founding prime minister's wife Kwa Geok Choo gave his old CYC tops to be displayed in an exhibition by the brand. One pin-striped number is framed in-store.
CYC's mojo seems to lie in a mix of shrewd leadership and the tangible luxury of clothing proven to last. A 50-year-old lemon-yellow shirt casually draped over a sewing table in-store is unmarked, looking and feeling like new.
Lower-cost outfit Ehkay Corner Tailors – with more than 40 years to its name – has 30 seamstresses , the same number as CYC. It also has a social media manager on the payroll.
Search-engine optimisation and TikTok, Instagram and Facebook pages are all taken care of. It is crucial work, says owner Dinesh Nandwani.
'Now, when you go to a restaurant, you're going to read up on it first. You're not just going to walk in. That's what customers do.'
His wife Hina Nandwani, the brains behind their early social media strategies, says results were almost instant when she began to update their pages on a fixed schedule during the pandemic. 'We got more calls, and the minute we opened doors after circuit breaker, we had an appointment.'
She adds: 'We have never paid for advertising. All our good reviews are genuine.'
Sign of the times
But these legacy tailors' fluent reading of the times are more exception than rule among the greying cohort.
Among the old crew of the Singapore Master Tailors Association, a website may still be a leap, depending on whom you ask.
Sixty-year-old member Kelvin Chan, a cutter of some bravura, has no online presence but a Facebook page last updated in 2019.
Only an overzealous Google search will drag up the media coverage of his shop, Tailor Chan, as a go-to for classic suiting since the time of its first owner – his father – or his time as a judge in Asian cutting competitions.
For jackets, he goes for sleeves ending at the base of the thumb, a la Savile Row rules. For marketing, word-of-mouth.
Says Mr Chia : 'Social media for us is a form of self-promotion. Some of us are old school, we don't believe in that.'
In any case, some degree of renewal is guaranteed for the quality tailor, who tends to inherit the loyalty that his diehard customers pass down to their sons.
Singapore also offers a counter case to time's assault on tradition in the Nonya kebaya.
The traditional Perankan dress' cachet has surged in the last 10 years or more – after an age of relative quiet in the later decades of the last century – buoyed by its Unesco inscription and popular local productions like The Little Nyonya (2008 to 2009) and 2025's Emerald Hill – The Little Nyonya Story.
Kampong Glam outpost Toko Aljunied, established in 1940, has since the 1980s sold custom Nonya kebaya sets – the work of media-shy seamstress Radiyah Aljunied, 68 – on top of its ready-mades.
Though competition has stiffened since, Ms Radiyah, still bent over the voile cloth of a Nonya top, says orders have stayed constant. She can even transfer the intricate embroidery onto a bigger top, a request frequently made by women who inherit their svelte mother's garment.
Her sister Zahra Aljunied, who helps run the Aljunied family's store, says the increased interest has also prompted a new stock of modernised kebaya bottoms, like one shaped like a skater skirt.
Madam Zahra Aljunied, daughter of the second-generation owner of Toko Aljunied.
ST PHOTO: LIM YAO HUI
Succession woes
About the only things this patchwork class of tailors can agree on are a rise in buff men and the uncertainty of succession.
On one level, family businesses are a hard sell to the next generation. Even bigger names, like CYC's Mrs Fong and Meiko Tailors' Ms Chung, were initially resistant and took years-long detours to the helm.
Mrs Fong says she returned to the business after a career at the American embassy in Singapore partly because no one else would, out of duty that 'can also be called passion'.
The next CEO need not be a Chiang, she adds, referring to her maiden family name.
Ms Chung, based in Shanghai until 2017, returned and later joined the business to boost the profile of her ageing father, whose masterful work she thought deserved greater recognition.
The bigger loss to the craft is finding fewer committed takers.
It used to be that every tailor would apprentice for one to five years. Now, the rare students who go to Tailor Chan's Mr Chan drop out after the three to six months it takes to learn the basics of making shirts and trousers, he says.
Then, they are off to set up their own shops, more eager to do the front-line work of sales.
The veterans tut at upstarts known to outsource orders to Vietnam and whisper of businesses started by amateurs with no training under existing tailors.
They groan at the plunge in serious aspiring tailors, but Mr David Deepak Nandwani says he understands the young's disinterest.
'They have more options now. The cost of living has gone up and salaries have gone up two, three times for other jobs. But for tailors, it's increased maybe only 50 per cent since the early 2000s,' says the 59-year-old, who runs tailoring business Mysingaporetailor.com.
Mr David Deepak Nandwani and his daughter Nisha representing Singapore at the Federation of Asian Master Tailors Fashion Show in Daegu, South Korea, in 2018.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF DAVID NANDWANI
At the same time, tailors report costs rising by some 300 to 400 per cent in the last 10 years. More recently, rents have gone up 'maybe 50 per cent' since the pandemic, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine raised prices of fabrics imported from Europe, says association chair Mr Chia.
But no veteran wants to retire, he adds.
They know it takes a lifetime to discipline cloth. It starts from taking the measure of a customer with a glance, with tape, then queering the cut to his peculiarities – the angle of the shoulders, size of hands, job and lifestyle – all the minutiae that go into notes kept like medical records.
Says Mr Chan: 'Even identical measurements cannot be cut the same way.'
A 36-inch chest measurement might be the result of a big or hunched back. To make the clothes fit, the tailor has to solve the puzzle in the pattern he or she draws for the finished product.
In competitions, tailors do this for 'misshapen' models, says Mr Chan. Each has their own methods, 'trade secrets' shaped by experience that cannot be communicated, only taught or lost forever.
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