In late December I arrived in Athens for the first time in winter. I had zero knowledge of what I might find other than the city that I knew of as a place you went to for a few days in the height or at the end of summer as you made your way to the islands.
It is a romantic city and I highly recommend you go in the middle of winter for it was to me more charming than I'd anticipated and it was nice to walk on those marbled streets without the heat being unbearable and the rubber of your sole heating up so much you couldn't wait to get off the sidewalk.
Athens in the middle of winter was thriving. The bars were full of uber Athenians, they seemed so much more evolved than some of the older style Greeks and Greek families of Australia. In fact, someone had once said to me something very amusing, and that is when Athenians travel to Australia they are amused that the locals still do dances that are one hundred years old and talk in a lingo that is the equivalent as if we brought Gatsby back and plonked him in a bar in Surry Hills - "I say Old Sport, might I have a mint julep ?". Mostly because many of us Greek Australians have never bothered to live in Greece ourselves and learnt our Greek from our forebears. Personally I am not much chop in Greek, the only thing I inherited was a desire to eat Greek food and make my own spanakopita (I owe a Greek lady in Canberra called Helen Minglis for my recipe, she is known as the Queen Of Spanakopita).
Anyway, I am wasting your time.
In Kolonaki, which I always thought stood for "Little Bum" which hopefully someone can clarify for me, I met the famous Takis Giannetos.
The shop is charming, located just above street level and you press on a buzzer to be let in. It's not a big space and it resembles something that's a hybrid between a workroom and a retail space. Quality wise they use most of the common bunches of wool and they sell a fair bit of VBC's Drapers wool. Most of the clientele are after wedding suits and the predominant work that was ready for collection was velvet jackets with satin lapels. But in the summer they do a fair bit of light blue wool suits and white jackets for black tie weddings.
There was not that kind of attention to detail or artisan touch that you come to expect from their Italian counterparts but I am inclined to think that Giannetos makes a sturdy suit that won't be coming apart anytime soon. And whilst some of the styles were not to my exact taste, one of the things you can kind of get from visiting a bespoke tailor is some sort of portal into the taste and design aesthetic of the people, albeit via the taste of the wedding market more specifically.
As for Takis, he was dressed very well in my opinion. More conservative than much of what was coming off the line. He wore a box check, sky blue shirt, navy grenadine tie and a woollen cardigan with an understated pochette. It was not what I'd have expected of an Athenian but then I am not entirely sure I would know what to expect of an Athenian.
Sadly, like all cities, Athens was over-run on all the high streets by the exact same labels you find in airports and major cities all over the world. I am kind of craving that eventually someone opens a stand-alone store and says "you can only get there here, that's it, no other store, so either come to our city and see us or go online, but that's it".
There are not many left. Bijan, which was solely on Rodeo Drive, is now expanding to multiple locations. Turnbull & Asser to some extent is like that with London and New York. Gaziano & Girling. Charvet.
I have grown bored of walking through airports seeing the same old high brow brands with their fancy interiors displaying the same product you saw in Rome, then in Paris, then at the airport in Singapore.... which is why I like going into smaller businesses like Giannetos, sometimes you find treasures, sometimes you don't, but it's still that aspect of exploration that gives a city personality and a reason to go there.
