es/jefe

O’Mast is a beautiful movie that sums up a lot about what I’ve been thinking about the last year.  It’s about Neopolitan tailors, craftsmen who have done tailoring since they were 10.  They apprenticed in pretty awful conditions and today have risen to be master tailors, creating suits that men wished they had.  As the film’s director, Gianluca Migliarotti said in the Q&A session after the screening, these guys are just “cool”.  

The film brings up a lot of points of discussion: the best way to tailor a suit (British “structured” vs Italian “unstructured”), the cost and availability of these suits to most people, and the sustainability of this shrinking industry.  A lot of these points were brought up in the Q&A session by people who know a lot more about suits and menswear than I do.  The point that resonates with me the most though, and describes what I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past year, is craftsmanship, creating suits by hand and directly with the end consumer.   

Outside of playing ultimate frisbee for the last 10 years, I think I am a pretty normal Asian guy in New York.  I work in consulting and get to travel within the US a little more than most people do, but I went to school 7 days a week when I was a kid, worked my butt off to get into a good NYC high school, came out of a decent college, got a few internships that led to a full-time job, and now rent an apartment in the Lower East Side.  

In the past year, I’ve really tried hard to be and do something different, and not be a person that works at their job for 40 years, has kids, and retires to a nice house.  There’s a part of me inside that wants to be creative, wants to work at a “craft”, wants to master something (or at least try).  There’s parts of my childhood I wish were different (less school would be one thing), but I am fortunate to be where I am with a decent job.  However, I’m convinced there’s more to life than just following the path that I have for the first 24 years of my life.  It’s not enough for me to be where and who I am because there are a lot of people who have spent a lot of time shaping me to do something in this world.

There’s something beautiful and exciting about creating real, tangible things like the master tailors do with the Neapolitan suits.  It’s something that I don’t get working as a consultant in front of a computer all day, creating spreadsheets to analyze whether a client has complied with bank regulations.  As a tailor or any other profession that creates tangible goods, what you produce is experienced by another human being, who forms opinions about it, and can share it with other people in the world.  While other people may read the reports that I write, I doubt it really has a personal impact as a beautiful suit may have.  Perhaps it is a little shallow, but even one person commenting how wonderful your Neapolitan jacket is a much more of an emotional response than I’ll ever get from the work I do for my job.

Also, being a craftsman means that these master tailors have worked all their lives at perfecting their craft, at getting better at what they do.  Maybe they are just technically brilliant, but it is hard to believe that these men do not passionately love what they do also.  I think doing something with passion creates emotional responses that aren’t the same when something is done technically correct only.  The director Migliarotti noted that he made this film out of passion (as evidenced by his Kickstarter page) and the result is a beautiful film about passionate tailors, who make beautiful suits you cannot make with a machine.  

A final point to make about the movie is that Gianluca Migliarotti repeatedly brought up a point about how these men worked all their lives to get to where they are today.  Sure, schools can teach the technical aspects to future generations of tailors, but there is knowledge in doing and working at your craft.  Sure, it may take longer to do things at first because mistakes will be made, but doing and working at your craft is the surest and sometimes the best way to learn.  

Even if I didn’t like menswear, I would have enjoyed this film because it is passion and craftsmanship bottled up in 67 minutes.  It was great to watch the film, and listen to the Q&A afterwards from the director, menswear enthusiasts, style bloggers (seeing these people in the flesh was also cool), and those in industry.  These people really have passion for what they do, which is a refreshing reminder coming from my job and industry.  The movie and the room of people are real examples of the “more to life” that I want.