Tradition

Germany has been home to a long tradition of tailoring, weaving and cloth-making for many hundreds of years and experienced its first industrial boom towards the end of the 18th century due to the developing textile industry. The ready-made clothing introduced at this time made it more affordable and further spurred the development of the industry. This flourished well into the 20th century and employed a large part of the population in many regions of the country. Since the 1960s, over 400.000 jobs have been lost in Germany as clothing companies outsourced production to increasingly cheaper and more distant countries for cost reasons. A decline in quality and price took its course. German production companies have almost disappeared from the clothing industry. The remaining clothing companies are struggling to cope with the decline in quality and have to compete with large vertical corporations.

My family, the Hildischs from Neustadt an der Orla in Thuringia, have been part of this special German history for almost 400 years, the history of a precise and sensitive craft full of feeling and dedication. You need that to have the patience to produce fabrics and clothing. You need that when you look at the vanishingly low wages that were paid in this craft for a long time. My great-great-great grandfather Christof Friedrich Hildisch, born in 1798, himself the son of a master cloth maker, was a master cloth maker and even married the daughter of a master cloth maker. Up until my grandfather, who died in 1969, every generation of the Hildischs had been primarily cloth makers, weavers and shoemakers. I had not heard much about this long tradition because my father was a soldier. It was only when I completed an apprenticeship as a tailor with the desire to become a fashion designer that I realized that I had a lot of ties to tailoring.

At the end of the long working days in the Miltenberg clothing factory, where I sewed jacket patterns for Daniel Hechter and Karl Lagerfeld on an assembly line, I went to my parents' basement where I continued sewing my own collections. I was the last apprentice in this company. The sewing workshop no longer exists. My vocational school no longer has a tailoring class. In the Aschaffenburg region, as in many other regions of the country, the tailoring trade is dying out. However, the quality and fit of German clothing should not be forgotten. Of course, we could never compete with the Italian tailors. Something like great design only reached German clothing production when the ship had almost sunk. Ready-made clothing was perhaps never cool and the voice of the quality manufacturers back then was never as loud as that of those who now hawk their junk from overproduction in the pedestrian zones, but this quality should not and must not be lost. It deserves a second chance, as a loyal companion, as a favorite piece, as history made into fabric...

as HiDDEN ACES jacket.