The film documents the extraordinary craftsmanship, skills, detail and experience that goes into making Thomas Pink’s 1984, Imperial and Made To Order shirts from a very small number of specialised shirt makers who have worked in the industry for decades. Quite literally, 50 pairs of hands with over a millennium of experience.
For Richard Gibson, the co-founder of Smyth and Gibson, a passion for shirtmaking and a penchant for detail are a way of life. “lots of shirtmakers will tell you that they sew with ‘18 stitches to the inch’, but then they look like a ploughed field,” he laughs. “It’s not about the number of stitches, which is just a setting on a machine, but how flat they are.” He insists that the real tests of the shirtmaker’s skill are the tiny - almost indecipherable - elements such as exceptionally flat stitching, buttonholes being of a high density but also hand-trimmed, and the placket of a patterned shirt being matched to the pattern on the body, the way the sleeve is set perfectly into the body of a shirt and that the fine fabrics used hold no tension. “They’re what elevates one shirt above another” notes Gibson. By wearing such a shirt, you are signalling something about yourself to the world -- that craft, quality and details matter to you.
