Benjamin Bowmaneer, Bespoke Tailor
Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland City-Watching Field Notes July 2023
(First, a quick meta-note regarding my ((some might say)) excessive use of footnotes: if you’re reading this via email, the footnotes are not-alive. But if you click ‘Open online’ at the top right of the email and view this piece at my Substack instead of in your inbox, the footnotes come alive, and pop up in little boxes when hovered over.)
Cordelia Fine: “A newborn human must be ready to join any cultural group on Earth, without knowing which,’ as evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel puts it. And our genes don’t know in advance what that cultural group’s consensus will be on the appropriate roles for men and women. A baby girl could potentially be born into a society that expects her to play piano and embroider, study at a university, walk dozens of miles a day to fetch water, plant crops, tend animals, prepare animal skins, or hunt animals— and to grow up to live a life of chaste wedded monogamy, or to have two or more husbands simultaneously. For a baby boy, his destiny might involve crafting musical instruments, butchery, making nets, milking, pottery, investment banking, or intensive child care— and his future wife could be a thirteen-year-old girl or a thirty-year-old professional. Some kinds of future roles are more likely across societies, certainly, but all are possibilities…”
Clover-hunting in the front yard, waiting for the Uber. First I find a two-leaf, but what good is that? Then a three-and-a-half leaf: one of the leaves caught mid-fission, a Siamese-twin leaf, only part-separated. Then one four-leaf, then another, then two more in quick succession. I give one each to Ellie and James, and fold the other two carefully, spread-eagled, into my journal.
“I reckon it’s the boat chemicals,”1 says James. “I’d crawl out from under the boat and be like Whoah- I’m so high.”
The Somali Uber driver has a faint scar-line running down his left cheek, the one facing me. We, his passengers, are discussing the virtues of marmalade. Afterwards I wander seaward from the Tepid Baths, then along the waterside, singing… (Something. I can’t remember the song now, only the feeling of it, slightly anarchic, subversive.)2 A showery day. I can’t remember the last time I set foot in downtown Auckland; it’s like another country.3
Crossing through the windy square with its monumental bronze chief and over to Queen Street, I see a sign outside Queen’s Arcade: King of Cards. Being in a Wizardly mode, fancy-free flâneuse, I follow my whim, step in, and ride the narrow escalator up to the cavelike back end of the arcade to see if they have any interesting Tarot decks. The jovial nerd with forearm tattoos tells me, at length, that in fact they carry no cards apart from Magic: The Gathering, to which I reply in a friendly way that the name of their shop is false advertising, then, implying as it does to my mind something more like the shop I half-remember from Melbourne, a tall space in some maze-like back-alley, overflowing with sleight-of-hand card decks and other tricksy paraphernalia.4
(The D20s in a bowl on the counter attract me— the luscious black and fake-ivory ones in particular; ink on a cream-coloured page— but I am happy just to touch them with my fingers. A bowl of dice is like a tin of buttons, or a bag of wheat: pleasurable as a multiplicity, something to run your hand through, like miser’s gold.)
As I leave the shop, I see another right next door that I’ve never noticed before.5 Tiny, antique, with a vintage army jacket on a mannequin in the window, Sergeant Pepperesque, scarlet with gold braid. The door next to it is open. I step inside and pick up the first item I see: a small book of tweed swatches. Each woollen square is a different colour, a spectrum of Britain. It’s an extremely beautiful object, and I turn the pages slowly, choosing which one I’d wear, settling on a moss-green with a sky-blue fleck.
The shop is an anachronism, like a rock in the stream of time,6 full of beautiful old surfaces: polished wood fittings, leather-bound book-spines, rainbows of fabric bolts. Hanks of black silk thread. Vintage ads and framed art7 lining the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Huge, strangely shaped pairs of scissors. Irons— small, heavy old ones— on cords coming down from the ceiling, like a dentist’s drill. A grey cutaway coat with silver buttons up on top of a set of shelves behind me, like a looming ghost. Other mannequins with jackets half-made, lines of white tacking stitch on them. Disorderly, maybe, to the casual observer; but only in the sense a personal working space ought to be, as if the workshop is a leather glove worn-in to the shape of the wearer’s hand. A masculine vibe in there, an occult vibe,8 in the true sense of occult, meaning hidden or secret. (Guild-like: arcane man’s-knowledge.)9 It feels exactly like being in one of my dreams.
The tailor is standing behind his bench, with the front and back panel of a nascent navy suit-jacket on his— what I want to call his anvil:10 a padded leather piece on a stand, a rounded ovoid shape to simulate the shape of a man’s chest,11 the same way a darning-egg simulates a heel. The leather is hard, dark and shiny with use. He’s somewhere around fifty, with a neat grey beard, longish white hair partially restrained by the two stacked pairs of glasses on the top of his head, a thimble on his middle finger, and tiny, silver needles— spares— stuck into the left panel of his pale blue shirt, over the ribs. The brightness of his gaze12 surprises me. When I show him the moss-green swatch, he says that tweeds have to be ordered from the UK, and are rather heavy for the New Zealand climate.
We get yarning. He switches off his podcast. I say how I enjoy sewing by hand, but not with a machine. Mending and alteration are my thing, really; upcycling. “Do you use a thimble?”13 he says.
”No.”
He hands me the thimble from his right middle finger: open-ended, so that the fingertip just pokes through. I put it on my own finger. (Warm metal— I think how uncommon it is to touch a stranger’s hand.) Too big: “You’d be about a nine.” he says.14 He tells me how you buy the cheap kind of thimble and step on it, to flatten it slightly and make it fit snugly.
“You see this needle I’m using?15 I’ll show you how a tailor stitches. This is the best way to make a row of straight stitches very quickly and accurately.” The needle— very delicate and sharp— is held in the middle (halfway between the eye and the point) between the thumb and forefinger. The thimble on the middle finger pushes the needle through the cloth. The trailing thread is caught between the third and fourth finger. He tells me that controlling the thread’s tail is the part apprentices find hardest to master. They’re always accidentally unthreading their needles.
He says amateur sewers are always switching their needle grip around, but you shouldn’t need to— this method is very quick and efficient, if you’re sewing a lining in, for example: “Otherwise it takes too long, and time is money.” He flips the piece he was working on over, to show me the basting, the padding all held in by long lines of running stitch.
”Thank you for showing me,” I say, “That’s solid gold information.”
I say he needs an apprentice to sew the more boring seams. Stitching is labour, I say.
Him: ”It’s craft, as well.”
(That goes without saying; it’s craft of the highest order.)
A suit is entirely designed to flatter the male figure: “All that horsehair makes the chest look bigger.”
I say that if I were rich, I’d order a suit off him. When I say how I favour masculine styles cut for a female body— wearing men’s clothes doesn’t work, as they’re ill-fitting; the waist too low, the neck too high, two ends of the same problem— he takes up his piece of tailor’s chalk and draws me a quick diagram on the blue serge laid across his bench. A man’s torso: a circle for the head, a horizontal line for the shoulders,16 and three tapering lines stroked down— spine and flanks. Then over the top, a woman’s: the triangle inverted, narrow shoulders, wide hips. He says he’s had a few women clients, but mostly men.
I tell him about my love of buttons, my extensive button collection. Me: “They’re the bones of fashion, the bit that lasts the longest.”
He opens a drawer, hunts through it, and pulls out a card of horn buttons.
Me: “Cow horn? No-”
”Buffalo.” we both say in unison.
He hands me a modern horn button, dyed black. And another kind of horn button, translucent like tortoiseshell. I am holding them in my palm like money. I say how I love tailor’s buttons, that tell of their own origins.
He shows me how a shanked button— like the brass ones on my jacket, New Zealand Army buttons17— is meant to be inset into the body of the jacket, through a slit. You use a curled wire, so that the buttons can be changed at will. “Silver, for instance.”18 He points up at the grey cutaway jacket: “That one is a coachman’s jacket— the crest on the buttons belongs to the family he worked for, who designed the wallpaper in Buckingham Palace. Plantaganets.”
The crest, in relief, looks like a pelican to me, like on the Thoth Empress card, the pelican feeding her babies with her own blood: but I can’t quite make it out.
I say that I have a lot of tagua nut buttons— vegetable ivory— but last year I found two real ivory buttons in an op-shop button bowl. “Yes,” he says, “That clasp holding the coachman’s jacket closed is ivory.” (Ivory rods clasped in silver filigree, linked by a silver chain.)
”Unfortunately— poor elephants.” he says.
He tells me about how he got into the stitching trade. He sat in the shop with the old man for eighteen years, and then when the old man died, he bought the shop. (Lock, stock, and barrel, I imagine: the objects in there look of a piece, and older than him.)
“What do you do, anyway?” he asks me.
”I’m an artist, and Wizard of Wellington.”
”Wizard— what does that involve?”
”Writing and so on. Reading the Tarot.”
He’s not into this at all.19 He tells me he’s a rationalist. I say that I am too, but I don’t think he believes me. I tell him my theory about the way the Tarot works: that it’s a complex random-image-generator enabling people to scry their own subconscious for knowledge inaccessible by more logical means.
He says he once had someone study with him who was some kind of a black magician— a shady character.
Me: “Yes, well. Apocalyptic times breed charlatans.”
Him: ”Apocalyptic?! How do you mean?”
Me: “Er— climate change leading to economic and societal collapse.”20
He finds this amusing. He says that au contraire, we’re living in the best of times.
He reckons he’s not that worried about climate change. There are really clever scientists, who will likely come up with something.21 Humans are the most sentient animal ever to have lived.
“What about orca?” I say. Gyrification of the brain etc. He’s already mentioned Douglas Adams, so I say, you know, like the dolphins in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Him: “Yeah, big brains. But they don’t have stuff.”
(Which, to my mind, is precisely the point of why orcas are superior: stuff is the whole problem.)
This historical moment is better than any other, he says. For instance, he’s going to the dentist later in the week. He gives another example of why things are better in the modern age: in the old tailoring manuals, they tell you how to cut for a whole raft of deformities that are now almost unheard of. Things that used to be common in the old days, like bow legs from a deficiency of Vitamin… A, or D, or something.
”Yes.” I say. “Rickets.”
”That’s the one. You know in the really old footage you’ll see them, walking like a pair of tongs?” He makes the shape of bow legs walking with his fingers in the air. “I’ve only ever had to cut for one person with bow legs. It’s just not a thing any more.”
I say sure, I think some things are better now, but that mostly the past was better. He says I’m obsessed with the past. (Ironic, I reckon, coming from someone practising an almost-extinct profession.) I say that the reason to study the past is to understand that nothing cultural is fixed.
Me: “Anyway… We’ll see, I guess.”22
I mention my friend, Enrique Enriquez, who lives in New York and speaks to birds, and is also, incidentally, one of the snappiest dressers I know.23
Him: “Why do you say my Master?”
Me: “Half-joking. But half-serious, too. He knows a lot; he’s smarter than me.”
Him, amused: “There are a lot of people out there smarter than you.”
I say that’s true, but there aren’t many people in my line of work, and as previously discussed, charlatans abound. Enrique— he’s real, and the things he knows about are things that I’m actually interested in.
Him: “Well, just keep reading books.”
Me: “I will, don’t worry.”
He recommends me a writer he thinks I’ll hate— an American economist— I’m half-amused, half-annoyed. I do the same back, telling him to read Ursula Le Guin. (Which he might actually not hate, as we’ve already discussed sci-fi.) The phone rings and he answers it. Afterwards he says “Guess who that was? My bow-legged client.”
Me: “See! Wizard business.”
“Nah, it happens all the time.”
I feel it’s time to go just as he says “Well, I’d better get back to work.”
I want to give him something, for all his generous sharing of information, and suddenly I remember the four-leaf clovers folded into my journal. Still fresh-green, but pleasingly flattened. “Here.”
Him: “What is it?”
Me: “It’s a four-leaf clover.”
Him: “How long did it take you to find?”
Me: “Five or three minutes.”
Him: “What for?”
Me: “Good luck.”
Him: “Good luck? Nah, that’s superstition.” He really doesn’t want to take it. He’s acting like he’s allergic to it.
I say look, just open any one of these books, tuck it inside and forget about it, see what happens. What have you got to lose? Repeatedly he tries to return it to me, but I won’t take it back. I say I have another one, he can do whatever he wants with it, I don’t care. He reluctantly puts it inside the front of his little black diary, saying that he’s going to give it away to the Magic: The Gathering dudes in the shop next door.
“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “It’s not magic, just a random genetic mutation.”24
A note on methodology: Writing this piece was an aberration from my usual habit of quick turnover. I spent a long time in the tailor’s shop— maybe three quarters of an hour— and afterwards wrote at length in my journal, noting down what I could remember of our conversation. I prefer to quote people exactly if possible, but in a conversation of that duration, a fair bit of what I wrote down was content rather than exact phraseology. Then, because I was away from home, a period of a few weeks elapsed before I got to the transcription from book to screen. So let it be said that this is not an interview, but rather a creative experiment in reconstruction from memory, thus, nonconsensual and cherry-picked. Errors and misinterpretations are my own.
The randomness of this encounter, its aesthetic richness, and the willingness of the tailor— Brendon— to be so generous with his time and knowledge made it a definite highlight of my visit to Auckland and, indeed, my City-Watching career to date.
If you have a pocketful of gold, and want to commission a bespoke suit, well… He is not very online, so go visit him yourself.
Mutating the clovers, that is.
Ah: it was Let Union Be. which I picked up at Tradfest. “We’ll end the day as we begun, we’ll end it all in pleasure.” It was that drawn-out word, pleasure, that felt rebellious, in the context of the Viaduct.
Usually I stay in the bush, venturing sometimes to the city fringe.
Also in Melbourne, I remember a specialist haberdashery shop, with thousands of amazing buttons.
Back in the day there used to be a comix shop up here, I think. And downstairs, the two halves of the record shop Marbecks, classical and non-, and the shoe shop where everyone bought their Doc Martens. And in the front of the Arcade, Gallery Pacific, with Doug Marsden’s exquisitely carved netsuke in the window.
Last survivor; like a very old person whose cohort are all dead.
Good art, too: works by New Zealand artists.
Not until I got home did I remember that tailoring is a profession traditionally associated with the Devil.
Homo habilis. I feel the same about many traditionally male-dominated fields of knowledge; mysterious, complex, tool-using skill-sets. I love the feeling of being let into useful secrets.
Everything has a name, and along with the loss of craft goes the loss of language. I wondered later if it was a shear-board, as in the song: Of his shear-board he made a horse, Benjamin Bowmaneer... Of his shear-board he made a horse, all for him to ride across…”
At Shanty Club the other night I was looking at the menfolk wearing their Club t-shirts, with a large printed logo on the breast— which lies flat on a flat chest— and remembered that form again, the tailor’s chest-jig.
Mark of a fellow Wizard. One can generally tell a Wizard by the eyes.
Of his thimble he made a bell, to toll the flea’s funeral knell…
Or some number like that.
Of his needle he made a spear, to prick the flea all in his ear…
“The neckline is the most important part of the jacket.”
My Moby Dick jacket; Costume Cave via Op for Animals. (Half-acrylic, but otherwise perfect, and beggars can’t be choosers. Just after I bought it, I was ironing it, and Betty’s brother Henry, a fabric merchant, came up and rubbed the fabric between his fingers.)
Usually I feel pretty well-dressed, but under the tailor’s appraising gaze, I felt less so.
Jeeves! The silver buttons tonight, I think.
For some people, a fanciful word like Wizard causes a door to slam shut in their minds.
And that’s how the wars began, Benjamin Bowmaneer…
“Like what?” I say. “Being Elon’s slaves on Mars?”
About the Apocalypse, that is.
Sartorial elegance: another Wizard-sign.
I hope he wins Lotto!
A farmerly note on clover. The four leaves are much more common in the "Dutch White" and "Broad Red" types of this plant. I imagine that clovers came here as agricultural plants due to their importance as Nitrogen fixers, so It's likely that these flouncy, tall stemmed annuals / biennials are a lot more common here than the "Wild White" perennial type, although that is also agriculturally important. When I was young, most of the wild white seed was harvested directly from the permanent grasslands of Romney Marsh where centuries of sheep-grazing had caused this perennial, hardy and very small leaved variety to evolve. The bigger leaf, and particularly the darker band showing in your specimen midway between the stem and the margin are the hallmarks of the the more intensively "bred" varieties.
For some reason, the name "haberdashery" associates with pirates in my mind (a phonetic crossover via "swashbuckling" or some other word that presently eludes me, most likely). Loved the piece. People's minds sure hold on to lots of irritating preconceptions. I suspect you might be a much more patient person than me overall. Might have a thing or two to learn there, wot.