Made In: Craig Robinson New York creates custom-made suits by hand

Craig Robinson, New York. I started in 1998. We were a small fashion brand. We did start out doing some runway shows, but really where our heart and soul is in bespoke tailoring, suiting, fine shirting, and we've been doing that ever since 1998. I started sewing when I was about eight years old. My mother and aunt worked at Levi Strauss when they were still making garments in the United States and New Mexico, but I knew if I was going to take something like fashion and style seriously I knew that New York would have to be the place where I moved no one's born into being a connoisseur of bespoke suits you know it's something that you have to learn and we can kind of teach you in the process of what it is sometimes we create animals it's a slippery slope some people can really get into this you know you get your first suit and you find out that that's like that that fit you know always wanted and it's pretty hard not to just only want that again. So the difference between an off-the-rack suit and one of our bespoke suits is a bespoke suit will have close to 20,000 hand stitches. The more stitches you put is the more mobility a suit will have. In one of our suits lifetime we could see it three into four times. We've been able to let it out, change the style sometimes. We still cut every jacket one by one whether it's off the rack or it's custom. It is a garment that we'd like to think that we're making it for life. Most suits that we've seen, we're still replacing linings from the 90s jackets. I have the privilege of just taking something from a piece of material and making it something special. It's not so much that I like fashion as much as I like style. Style to me is much different than fashion. It's just how you perceive yourself and how you want the world to perceive you.