Window shopping (in very expensive windows)
Thursday, August 14th, 2014
Away for the weekend celebrating Mr Sassy’s rather big birthday. He might have been expecting to spend a weekend road testing drum kits, somehow we wound up touring the fabric shops of London and Brighton.
What a very different experience to our local sewing shop. And yet, in some ways, not so different after all. Berwick St in Soho is certainly a life experience. At one end are the sex shops – straight ones, gay ones, not-quite-sure ones. None of them are especially seedy or threatening – more like ‘carry-on pretending’ than anything to worry about. At the other end is Oxford St. Chain stores, gift stores, the planet’s biggest jumble sale (Primark) and more people per square feet moving at so many different speeds it needs a PHD in chaos theory simply to stay upright.
And, in between are around a dozen top class fabric shops. The best shopping street in dressmaking Britain? Maybe. But you’ll need to know what you want. It could be all too easy to spend a lot of money in a very short space of time.
If you need some lace at £150 per metre, you’ll have a choice of ten in just one store. Fancy browsing through 1781 bolts of cloth (my little drummer boy counted them) in one anonymous-looking store? OK, make that two different shops (the second one actually had more), you’ll find them next door-but one.
My favourite was the Cloth House. They have two stores – one at either end of Berwick St. Both are laid out in such a way as to make fabric shopping fun. Both have a good selection of cotton, accessories, binding and buttons and both have staff keen to make you feel welcome. I could have spent hours in there
As an experience, Berwick St is something very special, but it feels like a different world. Many of the shops just sell cloth – massively expensive cloth and nothing else. My guess is that their customers are buying for a bespoke outfit. Taken to a tailor or carried to a couture-ist craftsman to be transformed into something wonderful.
24 hours later and a complete about-face. Fabric Land in Brighton is like Primark for value-hunting seamstri(what is the collective noun for seamstresses?) The prices are great, quality seems OK but it always somehow falls short of being an enjoyable experience. There are a few too many grumpy notices about what you can’t do and an absence of special-ness. Fab’ Land does however have Gingham check for £2.50 a metre. Yesterday in Soho I almost paid ten times that amount.
And here’s the challenge. I can’t easily spot the difference. It can’t be the same quality and I’m sure that, side-by-side, the two fabrics will each show their individual values, but no one in either shop seems to know how to do it and instead, they leave us, the customer to try and fathom it out. If anyone out there can explain how to tell the difference, I’d love to know.
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