SOMETIMES opportunity calls, and sometimes opportunity whistles at you from across the street. The e-mail came one morning in late October. A friend was writing to say that a pop-up Hong Kong tailor — a men’s suit and overcoat and shirt maker who, thrice a year, books a hotel room in which he does customer fittings before scurrying back to China to make the clothes and then mail them to you — was in New York. But he would remain for 10 more hours.
I desperately needed a new suit. The problem was that a car was coming to take me to the airport in 45 minutes.
Go? Delete e-mail? Wait till the tailor returns to New York in April?
In homage to the pop-up phenomenon, I popped. I frantically called the tailor’s number listed on the attached flier and made an appointment for 15 minutes hence; I rescheduled my ride to the airport.
I raced to the tailor’s room at the Marriott Marquis with all the breezy sang-froid of a donkey struck by lightning.
Anthony Asaf, a calm man in his 50s wearing a baggy pinstriped suit of his own devising, opened his hotel room door for me. “I haven’t bought a suit in 15 years,” I said. Mr. Asaf, the face of Empire International since its inception in 1983, responded, “Then it’s time.” The suit I bought in 1996 is the most boring garment I own: a navy blue number from Brooks Brothers, it’s the objective correlative of the word “sag.”
Hong Kong tailors are famous for their custom-made suits. But you don’t have to travel halfway across the world to have one of your own. Some of that city’s best tailors do a barnstorming tour across the United States, turning hotel suites into fitting rooms and taking orders for suits that run the gamut of styles and tastes (double-breasted teal silk, anyone?) that will appear on your doorstep a few weeks later.
Mr. Asaf guided me through the selection process, aided by his handsome twenty-something son (also wearing a suit of Mr. Asaf’s making) and a mostly silent older man in his 60s. Mr. Asaf said he offers three packages, depending on how many suits you want, and what kind of fabric you like. I gravitated toward the least expensive package, $899 for two suits and four dress shirts.
Mr. Asaf’s son, Mark, directed my attention to a 6-by-4-foot table on which he’d arrayed some 100 or so fabric swatches, and pointed to the 30 or so fabrics in my price range. I chose a light gray for one suit and a cerulean blue for the other. Mark then showed me a book filled with shirt fabrics; I chose four of varying hues.
Mr. Asaf and the older man then took copious measurements of my body with a tape measure. There seemed to be some concern about my waist, which they measured five times.
Holding the waistband of my Hugo Boss jeans, Mr. Asaf asked, “Is this how you usually wear your pants?” I said yes and asked, “Are they low riders?” He replied: “Somewhat low. I wear my pants this way, too. Some like higher, though,” and then, tugging on his own waistband, he pulled his pants up over his navel to demonstrate. I gushed, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no! I like low, but not hip-hop low. I don’t like to see cleavage.” He assured me, “Of course not.”
Mr. Asaf and the older man guided me to a full-length mirror. Placing a crudely sewn cotton suit form over me, the older man started pinning and tweaking it to fit my torso.
Sensing a lull in the conversation, I told Mr. Asaf, “Some friends of mine just published a beautiful-looking book about Anderson and Sheppard.” Mr. Asaf said: “British tailors are the best. Savile Row.” I asked leadingly, “But, uh, I hear that Hong Kong tailors can be very good, too?” Mr. Asaf smiled tightly and said: “Yes, sir. You are right there.”
The men asked me how many buttons I wanted on the front of the jacket (three), how many vents in the back (none), and whether I wanted tapering (“Yes, please. I want the jacket to do some of the work for me.”) For the shirts I chose classic collar rather than spread, standard cuff over French, and slim fit over regular.
Throughout, Mark would point to the suit and shirt he wore, for demonstration. I mostly opted for his choices, hoping they might make me look like a tall Asian man in his 20s. Nervously eyeing the time, I said, “This is the fastest shopping I’ve ever done offline.”
Mr. Asaf said they would mail one of the suits and one of the shirts in 10 weeks, to see if they fit, and send the rest of the merchandise later. I gasped when he handed me the bill that read “6,957 dollars.”
Mr. Asaf exclaimed: “That’s Hong Kong dollars! Hong Kong dollars! You thought, That’s too much, yes?” I said yes. (Actual price, $870.)
I asked Mr. Asaf what other cities he’d be visiting in April. He listed Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, among others. I thanked the three men for their time and hustled off to meet my ride to the airport.
Three minutes later, as I was about to hit the sidewalk, my cellphone rang. Mr. Asaf was calling to say that, in my money panic, I’d left my credit card behind. I jumped onto the elevator and seconds later found myself running down the hotel corridor to Mr. Asaf’s room, where he was standing in the doorway. I said, “I’ve never popped this much in one day! I’m going to explode.” He smiled somewhat gravely and said, “Here you go, sir.”
Two hours later, having boarded my plane and finally caught my breath, I thought, cerulean blue?
This question continued to grow in shape and dimension over the next eight weeks, occasioning many visits to Empire International’s Web site (empiretailors.com). The transitory nature of Mr. Asaf’s pop-up service had helped me vault over 15 years of inaction and sag, but had it also made me buy wardrobe for “Guys and Dolls”?
In mid-December, when I opened the pillow-size DHL plastic bag containing the suit, and beheld the suit’s beautiful color, the answer was a resounding no. I put the suit on. The fit was terrific.
I tried my new duds out that night on my boyfriend. Greg said he loved it. I asked, somewhat neurotically, “Does it look a little ... corporate?” Greg looked again. “Not at all,” he said, “Actually, it’s sort of black vocal group.”
He walked over to the iPod and announced that he was going to play some Philly soul in the suit’s honor. Cue Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ version of “Wake Up Everybody.”
Given that we were headed for Amsterdam two weeks later for the holidays, I decided to wear the suit for the first time on New Year’s Eve in one of the world capitals of fun.
Indeed, on the very brink of 2012, the suit found itself lounging attractively in an Art Nouveau architectural masterpiece (the Grand Hotel Amrath) before dancing the night ragged in a Jordaan apartment whose open windows looked over a street erupting with a lot of fireworks. From haute to dangerous — Mr. Cerulean, take me away.
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