Park Ji-hwan's overcoat is older than his mother. It is a heavy brown wool, double-breasted, cut in 1968 by a tailor in Myeong-dong for his grandfather, who wore it to a shipping office for thirty years. When Park, twenty-six, discovered it in a wardrobe after his grandfather's funeral, the lining was shredded and the shoulders were two sizes too wide. Today it fits him perfectly, and on the streets of Seongsu, where he works as a furniture designer, strangers stop him to ask where he bought it.
Park is part of a quiet movement that has been gathering pace across East Asia and southern Europe. Young men and women, many of whom grew up buying cheap clothes that barely survived a season, are going back to family wardrobes. They are looking for coats, jackets and trousers made when tailoring was local and cloth was built to last. What they turn up is often damaged, dated and badly sized. What they want is to wear it anyway.
The alteration renaissance
This is where the alteration tailors come in. For decades their trade was in decline, reduced to hemming trousers and replacing zips. Now the best of them have waiting lists. In a narrow workshop near Euljiro, the tailor Choi Min-seok spends most of his week remaking inherited garments. He can narrow a shoulder, recut a lapel, reline a coat in silk and rebuild a collar, all while preserving the character of the original. He charges accordingly, and nobody seems to argue.
The same story is playing out elsewhere. In Tokyo, a small shop in Kōenji called Tsuzuki, meaning continuation, will not sell new garments at all; it only alters and repairs clothing that customers bring in with a family history attached. In Naples, where tailoring has always been a matter of neighbourhood pride, several old sartorie report that a third of their work now comes from young clients carrying their grandfathers' jackets in plastic bags.
My grandfather was a small man with big shoulders. I am a tall man with small shoulders. The coat had to learn to be both of us. — Park Ji-hwan
There is sentiment in all of this, of course, but also a sharp aesthetic logic. Coats made fifty years ago tend to be heavier, longer and more generously cut than anything sold on the high street today. The cloth has a density and drape that is expensive to reproduce. Worn with a plain knit and soft trousers, an inherited overcoat looks less like vintage than like something quietly and confidently expensive, which, in a sense, it is.
Park wears his almost every day from November to March. He has had the elbows patched once and the pockets rebuilt, and he expects to have the lining replaced again within a decade. He has already decided who will inherit it. His nephew is four years old and has, Park reports with some satisfaction, exactly the same broad shoulders as his great-grandfather.
