The atelier
Notes from the workshop outside Colombo, and the hands behind each piece.
The atelier sits on a quiet road south of Colombo, in a low building shaded by frangipani trees. The room is whitewashed and naturally lit. There are twelve cutting tables, eight finishing stations, and a small office at the back where the pattern files are kept in lever-arch folders, by season, going back to the early nineties.
The workshop has been run by the same family for three generations. The current head of production learned to cut from her father, who learned from his mother. She handles every first sample herself. We do not move into production until she has worn the toile for a working morning and reported back, in writing, on how it sat through bending, reaching, sitting at a desk for a long stretch.
Each piece passes through perhaps eight pairs of hands before it is folded into its box. The cutter, the pattern marker, the seamstress on the main carcass, the seamstress on the linings, the topstitch finisher, the buttonhole maker, the presser, the final inspector. We list them on a small card that goes into the parcel. Not by name — they prefer it that way — but as a count. Garment number eleven of forty-six. Made by the hands of seven women and one man, over four working days.
This kind of production is not fast. A single overcoat takes between fourteen and sixteen hours of labour, not including the cutting of the canvas or the pressing of the seams. We pay above the going wage for skilled tailoring in the region; we audit the wage twice yearly and publish the result to anyone who writes to us. We do not subcontract. The atelier is the only place a Zelon garment is made.
It is a small workshop. We will not scale it. The character of the work depends on the smallness — on a head of production who knows every cutter by name, and on a building that is quiet enough to hear the scissors against the wool.