Tradition

The German clothing trade

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 at the end of the 18th century due to the developing textile industry. The clothing assembly introduced at that time made them more affordable and further fueled 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, more than 400.000 jobs in Germany have been lost because the clothing companies had production in increasingly cheaper and distant production countries for cost reasons. A decline in quality and price began. German manufacturing companies have almost disappeared from the clothing industry. The remaining clothing companies are struggling with the deterioration in quality and have to compete with vertical large corporations.

The Hildischs

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 devotion. You need that to have the patience for the manufacture of fabrics and garments. You need them if you look at the vanishingly low wages that have long been paid in this trade. 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 to my grandfather, who died in 1969, every generation of the Hildischs had been mainly cloth makers, weavers and shoemakers. I hadn't heard much of 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 in common with 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 in a chord, I went to my parents' basement where I continued to sew my own collections. I myself was the last apprentice in this company. The sewing shop no longer exists. My vocational school no longer has a tailoring class. In the Aschaffenburg region, as in many other regions of the country, tailoring is exposed to extinction. However, the quality and fit of German clothing should not be forgotten. Of course, we were never able to measure ourselves against the Italian tailors. Something like big design had only been recognized by German clothing manufacturing when the ship had almost sunk. Ready-made clothing may never have been cool and the voice of the quality manufacturers at that time was never as loud as that of those who now sell their junk of overproductions in the pedestrian zones, but this quality should not and should not be lost. she deserves a second chance, as a loyal companion, as a favorite piece as a story ...

as HiDDEN ACES jacket.