A Bespoke Tailor In Sydney - Leng Ngo - And Also Does The Best Alterations In Town

Flash as a rat with a gold tooth. That's what my old business partner used to say to me if I wore anything too ritzy. But ritz is sometimes just my thing. This most recent suit was supposed to be an homage to the gangster films such as Goodfellas and Casino - where slubbed silk dupioni was de rigeur in the world of gambling, mafia connections, cocaine use, women of ill repute, wives who disdained women of ill repute and threw things at their husbands, murder and intrigue and what not. Not that anything like that happens in my life. But I do love the theatre of clothes.

So the first problem to solve was where to find the silk dupioni. We found it out of the New York office of Holland And Sherry through Zalman Lever, of Alexander Black NYC, a custom clothier. Zalman sourced the fabric and measured me, took notes on the styling I wanted and then I have him carte blanche to do the trousers as he saw fit. I wanted the suit to have presence as it will be in the window of the Studio for the spring carnival horse racing season.

Once the suit was finished in the Chinese workroom is was then sent to Sydney where I then took it to my tailor, Leng Ngo, below, and he finished the suit by bring it in here and there, finishing the trousers, bringing them slightly in to be more tapered and he also finished the button position and put grey Australian mother of pearl buttons on front and sleeves.

The result was to my mind, spectacular. The slubbed silk and the shimmy of the electric blue is so visually arresting that every time I walk past the Studio window I have to stop myself. Even after all these years of working with fabrics and making bow ties, I still get so excited when something really catched my eye and this is one of those stand out cloths I have worked with.

But it's not on the mannequin that it really comes alive. It needs a human. So I walked out of my office last Friday night and went to a bar. I wore no socks with a pair of Lobb Kiplings, put on a high collar pink shirt that was made for my by Studio Shirts in Macquarie Street and then I threw on a triple warp garza grossa bow tie made by us. You know, you have no idea how wonderful it is to take a portly somewhat long in the tooth man like myself and voila, a star is born. A movie star. A sheik. An oil baron. A shipping magnate. Such is the fun with good tailoring that nobody in the bar that I went to thought of me as a small artisan working out of a 30 square metre space. It was like, if you will, letting the genie out of the bottle.

If you, like me, enjoy a bit of theatre in life. Google Leng Ngo and he can knock you out a suit like that. Or google Alexander Black NYC if you are stateside and he will sort you out.