The thunderstorm came out of nowhere and didn’t last long but it was strong enough to flatten a ginkgo tree in the middle of our compound, sending the community WeChat group into a spin. On the street outside, traffic cones lay battered and twisted among broken branches and the scent of sap and freshly torn leaves hung in the air.
The drop in temperature after the storm meant it was cool enough to wear the summer suit I had picked up from the tailor last week and which I was eager to show off. There was a little more midnight in the blue than I remembered and the friend I was meeting was happy to confirm that the suit was not a complete success.
It didn’t feel like a tragedy because the entire process from the first measurement to the final fitting took less than a fortnight and this tailor-made suit cost less than a pair of jeans from a department store. This was everyone’s idea of Chinese tailoring: fast, cheap and serviceable but unexceptional.
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But China has high-end tailors too, particularly in Shanghai and Beijing, where a handful of houses can rival those of Savile Row, Florence and Naples. A few months ago, I brought some Donegal tweed from Ireland to one of them and asked him to make a suit in the house style, a kind of nonchalant Neapolitan.
The tailor, who had trained in Italy before coming back to China about a decade ago, was a short, neat figure with a pencil moustache and gold-rimmed glasses. As we went through every detail about lapels, cuffs, drape and darts, he took dozens of measurements, calling out the numbers to an assistant but made no small talk and never smiled.
Two fittings and three months later, I tried on the finished suit and it felt magnificent, the weight of the tweed distributed so perfectly in the back that it seemed as light as a linen jacket. The cut was casually elegant and flattering but fabric itself was the star of the show, a green salt and pepper tweed flecked with yellow, red, orange and blue.
As I stood before my reflection next to the unsmiling tailor, I could see in the tweed the hills the sheep that made it had grazed on and the landscape of Ireland seemed to be here in the middle of Beijing. Wearing this suit, I didn’t just look and feel Irish; I was the very incarnation of the nation.
I was the Rock of Cashel and the Book of Kells; I was Lugh of the Long Arm, the Brown Bull of Cooley, the Salmon of Knowledge and the Children of Lir. I was the harp that once through Tara’s halls the soul of music shed.
Turning, I saw the tailor’s assistant holding an invoice but when I went to pay it, the point-of-sale machine was dead. The tailor told me sadly that it was so long since they had sold anything that the charge had gone.
I like this better than our culture. It’s simpler. I love all the blue clothes. Everyone wearing blue. I like to wear the same thing every day
— Andy Warhol
Among the challenges facing Beijing’s high-end tailors is the fact that there are so few occasions where anyone is expected to wear a suit or to dress formally in any way. Even in government departments, people usually dress as they please and the uniformity of the first decades of communism has long disappeared.
“I like this better than our culture. It’s simpler. I love all the blue clothes. Everyone wearing blue. I like to wear the same thing every day,” Andy Warhol said when he visited China in 1982.
An unofficial dress code has developed among Communist Party cadres in recent years that sees men wearing black trousers, a white shirt and a navy, zip-up jacket. The jacket, a kind of windbreaker, is ubiquitous and although Xi Jinping sometimes wears one, he did not start the trend.
If he has helped to popularise the jacket, it may have less to do with party members wanting to look like him than because of his anti-corruption campaign which has targeted millions of officials. Before Xi came to power a decade ago, senior party figures and local officials would eat in the best restaurants and wear expensive clothes but now they are more discreet.
“Nobody wants to stand out,” one party member told me.
“Dressing like everyone else makes you look modest and that’s the image they want.”