DIMINISHING TRADE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 176, 28 July 1942, Page 3

DIMINISHING TRADE

JOURNEYMAN TAILOR

EFFECT OF MODERN TREND

The Auckland man with a taste for good clothes will be hard put to it to find a tailor 20 years hence. To-day, in the Auckland metropolitan area, there are fewer than 60 journeyman tailors at work. Contrast this with the position in 1908. when there were approximately 300 journeyman tailors daily engaged in Auckland.

Discussing the condition of the trade to-day, a city tailor of long experience explained that since the last war tailoring had made little appeal to young men and few youths had been apprenticed. While' other trades attracted apprentices, tailoring was almost wholly neglected. More than ever than in the past 100 years men are now wearing machine-made suits, and a great many are wearing ready-made clothing. Also, there has come into popularity what is known as mercers' trade, in which shopmen fit customers and then send the work out to large workshops in which the majority of employees are pressers and women. The old tailor made a careful calculation on paper based on his knowledge of tne trade in the city, and this revealed that there were comparatively few journeymen tailors sewing cross-legged on the tables. In Old Auckland Thirty years ago there were several shops in Auckland employing as many as 16 or 20 journeymen." Today, said the old tailor, the maximum number so employed in any one shop was about seven. Cutters worthy of the name were a fast-disappearing race of craftsmen. The average age of those engaged to-day would be well over 50.

One of the consequences of this shortage of journeymen is that those establishments where true tailoring is carried on constantly work under pressure. In the best-patronised shops there is always a considerable time-lag between the date when the measurements are made and the delivery of the finished garments. So great is the pressure on the trade that the war has had scarcely any effect at all on the capacity of tailors' shops to cope with orders offering. Although tens of thousands of young men are in the armed forces, the remaining section of the male population, consisting of youngsters under 18 years of age—few of whom can afford a properly tailored suit—and men over the age of 40 years present a sufficient demand for tailored clothing to keep all the available journeymen fully occupied. In some places the suit ordered to-day could not be finished until about six weeks hence. Division of Labour The system known in the trade as "division of labour," whereby skilled women employees work side by side «rith journeymen tailors, alone made it possible to maintain tailoring on an acceptable standard, said the old tailor. It was his opinion that the days when full tables of journeymen were the accepted rule of the trade were unlikely to recur since, the "division of labour" practised made it possible not only substantially to reduce the cost of the suit—and therefore the price to the customer— but expedited the execution of the order. Old hands in the trade shook their heads sorrowfully at the prospect of the inevitable day when cutters possessing the necessary skill to produce a first-class suit will be almost non-existent.