A Tailor’s Tale

Tailoring is one of the oldest trades yet the art is often undermined in our society. Tailoring clothes never used to be about fashion. It was literally about stitching two pieces of cloth together to make a larger cloth and eventually make something a person could wear. Tailors still do that. You will never see a pattern in a tailors workshop because it is about fitting a customer individually and not the other way around.

When it comes to tailoring, size doesn’t matter, it’s all about body shape. The trade of a tailor is to make or alter garments because human beings come in all shapes and forms. It would literally take years and years of pattern work to make a fit for all of us.

Tailoring is a field dominated by foreign men and women in Namibia, so it’s easy to see how we actually feel about the art.

The story of Soro Laue Gervais is far from a sad one and just goes to show how finding value in the simplest things can bring success beyond the narrow notions of what is the norm.

A tailor from the Ivory Coast, Soro recounts his journey and how he came to be a one of the best tailors in Namibia. “After Grade 12, I had hopes of becoming a doctor, but in a place like the Ivory Coast where the population is high, you don’t have the luxury of picking what you study. You are placed in a field and that is that.”

Luckily Soro got into the faculty of medicine, but he was sent to the mortuary and quit after a year. “They put me in the mortuary to inspect dead bodies to find the cause of death. I had to open dead people up and I couldn’t take it so I left school.”

Leaving school would not be the end of Soro, but it had him down and out for a long time. “After I left school, I was just at home, doing nothing. I had a friend who was a tailor and I would spend time there and could see how much money he was making. I asked him if he could teach me and he refused because he didn’t want to be a part of my ‘failure’.”

Soro explained that in the Ivory Coast, being a tailor was seen as a job for uneducated people who took up the craft simply to survive. So his friend meant that he would not help Soro became a tailor because he was educated enough to be anything else.

However, Soro was determined. He needed money and at the time tailoring seemed the best option. “I started working for a tailor. She wouldn’t let me work on the clothes so I did the paper work, but in my lunch hour I would take pieces of fabric from the floor and I started teaching myself how to sew. After a year I could put together something. I still wasn’t good enough but I was determined to start my own thing.”

Soro took a leap of faith and opened up his own tailoring shop. “When I opened, I could only make a shirt. I started making shirts and would display them in the window. People liked them and started to buy from me. One of the tailors from the place I worked came with me so he would sew and I would do the consulting and styling.”

It was a good business, until the unthinkable happened. “One day my tailor friend quit and I was left alone during peak time. I will never forget that day. I couldn’t sew a garment. Customers were coming in to look for their things. I couldn’t even give them back their money and fabrics because he had cut everything already. That’s the day I became a real tailor.” Although Soro pulled through and his business survived, he became disinterested as a tailor and just couldn’t do it any more.

“It was not the life I had envisioned for myself so I closed the shop and tried to figure out my next move. I prayed a lot during this time for a sign.”

“At the time, my dream was to travel to South Africa and try to do something there and it seemed I would have to use tailoring to get me there. When the opportunity came for me to move to Namibia, it was as a tailor. I knew then no matter how I tried to run away from this, it was my calling. When I moved here it was like a dream, everything felt right.”

Soro started his own tailoring business in 2011 and is the proud owner of Vaniah’s Tailor that employs seven people. Soro is resolute that there is nothing he would do differently. “I like what I do, making people feel good and helping their ideas come to life. C’est mon vie c’est and je suis content (that is my life and I am happy).

Soro’s story is a clear depiction of the possibilities and success that come from following the path that was set out for you, no matter how underrated what you do is perceived to be. If it is your destiny, you will find the value in it and make others see the importance of your work.

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