A week at the atelier in Porto
Every shirt we sell is cut, sewn, and pressed by 22 people in a converted printworks in Porto. We spent a week watching them work.
By Rui Teixeira2 min read
The atelier sits on the second floor of an old printworks, 3 streets from our Porto store. It has sewn our shirts since the first collection in 2016, and it is run by the same family that opened it in 1987. Today 22 people work there. Most of them have been there longer than we have existed.
Monday: cutting
The week starts at the long table by the windows. Cloth is laid out in up to 40 layers, and the pattern pieces are marked by hand rather than by machine. It is slower, but a cutter can shift a piece to miss a flaw in the weave, and a machine cannot see one.
Tuesday to Thursday: sewing
A shirt passes through 9 pairs of hands. One person sets collars and does nothing else, and she can tell a good collar from a bad one by touch. Seams are sewn at 6 stitches to the centimeter, which is slow but makes a seam that lies flat and does not pucker after the first wash.
Buttonholes come last, on a machine that does nothing else. The buttons are sewn with a shank, a few turns of thread under the button, so they sit high enough to fasten easily and do not tear the cloth when you do.
Friday: pressing and checking
Every shirt is pressed by hand and checked against its pattern. About 1 in 50 goes back for a seam to be resewn. Nothing leaves the building with a fault we know about.
We do not make many shirts. We make them so they come back to be mended, not to be replaced.
We pay the atelier when the shirts are delivered, not 90 days later, and we agree on the price before the cloth is cut. That is less a policy than the reason they still pick up the phone when we call.
