We recently took advantage of one of the great benefits of living in a land of cheap textiles and cheap labor: custom tailoring. Much of the material used in the clothes we wear everyday comes from Indonesia, but until recently, we had never bought fabric on our own.
A couple weeks ago, we went to one of the massive fabric markets in North Jakarta with some of our friends. Indonesians of Indian heritage dominate the textile industry here and all the shops we visited sold just as much colorful material for saris as they did traditional Indonesian batik.
I bought material to have three suits made and Hill bought material for a few skirts, dresses and tops. I opted for the cheap wool, unlike one of my friends who decided to fork over the extra cash for Italian cashmere. All told, I spent about $40 per suit for the material.
We were able to take advantage of this because one of our Indonesian colleagues from the embassy recently brought his tailor to the embassy and he'd made suits for some of Hillary Clinton's staff in the short time they were here. He did a good job, so we were willing to give him a try.
The three suits he made for me all turned out great, and considering he charged around $70 per suit for the labor, I really can't complain. As we were talking before he left, he mentioned that he had made an Indonesian batik shirt for former Secretary of State Warren Christopher. You may have already figured it out by reading the title, but we soon learned how he got connected with a high-ranking U.S. official. He was the former tailor of Suharto, Indonesia's second president who ruled the country for 32 years.
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