My mother bought it at Neiman Marcus in the late ’90s—the magical decade when brands like Jil Sander and Prada were inventing the sharply tailored silhouette that they are both returning to now. This current revival feels like the right time to update an old piece—with an eye toward pairing it with my vintage column dresses and the slim pencil skirts that have replaced the wide-legged jeans of my college days.
I met up with Gage Flores of Age Design Services, a tailor on Manhattan’s Lower East Side who owns and operates a mending and alterations business out of his truck. The challenge I presented to Flores, he told me, wasn’t the first—he’d been fielding a surprising amount of silhouette-shrinking requests lately, he said—but it elicited a great excitement.
“I love working with clothing that already has a story,” he gushed. “How people choose to make something their own is often more interesting than the garment itself.”
Fiddling with the jacket during our impromptu fitting session, Flores and I decided that the piece needed a more assertive feel: The single-button closure would become double-breasted, with dark contrasting buttons; the sloping sleeve heads would sharpen; and he would cinch the waist ever so slightly. Forty-eight hours later, he had utterly transformed the jacket.
It was by no means unrecognizable—it still smelled of perfume from my closet, and the alpaca was still worn down at the elbows and collar from nearly three decades of use. But Flores’s sleight-of-hand tweaks (which also included adding suede cuffs) turned it into something I could shrug on my shoulders and saunter around in like a Prada Nosferatu.
When I texted a photo of the final product to my mother, she was elated to see the way “her” jacket had been reimagined. She even allowed, with a laugh, that it might be “just a little more hip.” The best fashion, it turns out, is always tailor-made.