Tailors

Forget about what her hairdresser knows. These days, it's what her tailor knows that counts. According to tailors and dressmakers, the economy has brought a definite change in the kind of merchandise they are handling. They say they are seeing more old treasures and fewer new treats. A tight budget, or the thought of rough times ahead, has many of their clients--men and women--locked into clothing reruns.

CALI, Colombia - To say Luis Abel Delgado of Cali occupies a special niche in the global rag trade is an understatement: He's made vestments for two Roman Catholic popes, as well as inaugural sashes for several Latin American presidents. His sartorial skills have taken him from extreme poverty in southwest Colombia to the Vatican and several presidential palaces as an honored guest. He says that he's on a first-name basis with newly elected Pope Francis, who calls him Abelito, and that he spoke monthly with Pope Benedict XVI. "The new pope is as humble as they say. He insists I call him Don Francisco," Delgado said at his modest apartment in a southern suburb of Cali.

You won't find custom tailor Michael Renzi of Newport Beach feeding fabric into a sewing machine, cutting out patterns or performing many of the other tasks commonly expected of a tailor. In fact, Renzi admits he does not know how to sew. Renzi represents a new generation of tailors who spend little if any time working with needle and thread. Today's master tailors are more likely to be found schmoozing than sewing.

One look at the setting - a barn dressed with livestock, bales of hay and picnic tables - and it's immediately obvious that this is no ordinary funeral. The casket's shaped like an oversized grill used for smoking meat, and pallbearers are wearing crisp white aprons and chef's hats. Live pigs squeal and run amok, while a tabletop fountain spits out barbecue sauce instead of chocolate, perfect for dipping freshly cooked ribs. This is the eternal send-off, after all, of Willie "Wolf" McCoy, the man whose soulful voice is immediately recognizable to millions of people.

A tailor's assistant faces up to a year in jail after he reached into the dress of a woman having her bridal gown adjusted and fondled her breasts, according to the Orange County district attorney's office. Fong Tran Dinh, 34, of Westminster was convicted Thursday of misdemeanor sexual battery following an incident in March 2002 at his father's Westminster Mall tailor shop, Tommie's Tailoring. Dinh, who is scheduled to be sentenced Feb.

It started years ago on the sultry Indonesian island of Java when I arrived without enough cool clothing. Out of desperation, I approached street-side mom-and-pop tailors in the city of Yogyakarta. They spoke no English, so I relied on rough sketches and pantomime to communicate that I wanted to turn a $2 batik sarong into a pair of loose-fitting trousers. They could copy the waistband from my Banana Republic shorts.

When David Rothenbuehler of Laguna Niguel wants a new wardrobe, he makes a "rag run" to Bangkok. Every year or so Rothenbuehler travels overseas to buy suits for $150 that he says would set him back $1,500 to $2,000 at local retailers. He orders a stack of custom shirts made of 100% cotton, complete with monogram, for $15 each; he says they'd cost $100 each here. After a few days in Bangkok, he heads home with suitcases full of new clothes.

IN an early episode of the new NBC show "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," Matthew Perry's producer character berates his crew of writers for dressing like adolescent bums. "I've just decided that it's no longer cool for grown men to dress as if they're in junior high school," he screams as the camera pans across men in jeans, T-shirts, flannel shirts and knit caps. "We're all going to act, dress, talk, write and behave professionally." He might as well have been the voice of L.A.

Behind the Pantheon, the scissors of nimble- fingered men glide through cloth, and cassocks are sewn with handmade buttons and watered silk. The men measure sashes, snipping silver, unraveling gold. They are quiet, deliberate, moving amid scents of wood and wool and the crinkle of brown paper packages addressed to priests and cardinals and, perhaps one day soon, a new pope.

When Martin Greenfield was a young tailor working for GGG Clothiers in Brooklyn making custom suits for Dwight D. Eisenhower, he liked to tuck little notes detailing his concerns for the nation into a hidden trouser pocket for the president to find "by accident." "If you want to end the war," one of his anonymous notes said, "you'll send John Dulles [Eisenhower's secretary of state] on a two-week vacation."

Pulling into a Staples Center parking lot Tuesday afternoon, I encountered the Lakers' biggest, shaggiest dilemma. "Hey, good news, Pau Gasol is coming back tonight, right?" said the attendant. "Yeah, and you still probably want him traded, right?" I said. "Well, yeah, he is a little soft. " Can we take all this talk and park it? Just pull it into a back space on the bottom level and forget it about it? You want to jabber about shipping out one of the smartest and most skilled big men in basketball, can you do it outside of the glare of Gasol's championship rings and endless basketball IQ?

For retired school psychologist Cathy Paine, the shooting in Newtown, Conn., evoked painful memories of that day nearly 15 years ago when her school district suffered a similar tragedy. Paine, 63, was one of the first counselors to arrive at Thurston High School in Springfield, Ore., after a student opened fire in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 25. Today, she belongs to the National Assn. of School Psychologists and leads a team that provides assistance to schools, families and communities dealing with crisis.

For holiday parties, today's sophisticated man can take a cue from runways and red carpets by choosing tuxedos for formal occasions or components thereof for more casual events. Fashion designers, obsessed as they are these days with all manner of tailored clothing and reinvigorated by a generation of young men who are wearing suits for the first time, have been busy reinventing the tux. Style-watchers got wind of the possibilities in 2011 when actor Ryan Gosling, justly celebrated for his red-carpet acumen, gave a one-two punch to tradition by appearing at Cannes in a sky-blue tuxedo for the premiere of "Drive" and a deep maroon counterpart two nights later (both by Salvatore Ferragamo)

Looking to tap the wealth of U.S. Latinos, CNN is planning to introduce a Spanish-language programming service tailored for broadcast TV stations next year. The service, CNN Latino, is being designed as an eight-hour programming block featuring news, documentaries, talk shows and lifestyle programming. It is expected to launch in late January in Los Angeles on independent station KBEH-DT Channel 63 and eventually be carried by TV stations in other cities. CNN Latino comes 15 years after the Atlanta-based news organization launched CNN en Español, a 24-hour Spanish-language news network available in about 30 million homes in Latin America and 7 million homes in the United States.

CAIRO - Amid thimbles, pins and strands of silver thread, the tailor twitched his pencil-perfect mustache in disgust and said the country where he learned to sew and raised six children was edging into darkness. "I'm worried," said Sayed Abdelwahab, leaning on a worn counter in a shop where he has mended suits for decades. "I have employees with three and four kids. I'm responsible for them. My customers are mostly foreigners, but they're leaving the country. My business is down 50%. Did you see what happened to the stock market?"

In one of the most famous 1st Amendment cases in U.S. history, Schenck vs. United States, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. established that the right to free speech in the United States is not unlimited. "The most stringent protection," he wrote on behalf of a unanimous court, "would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. " Holmes' test - that words are not protected if their nature and circumstances create a "clear and present danger" of harm - has since been tightened.

They'll strip the color from a cotton-rayon blend if it's not exactly the right hue. They scour bolt after bolt of fabric in search of that perfect print for a down-and-out singer's vest or trim to enhance a pair of women's evening bedroom slippers. These are the details that theatergoers may not notice but that have been painstakingly discussed, sketched and fretted over by the costume department at South Coast Repertory. After all, they say, it's the clothes that make the character.

The world's oldest pair of jeans -- made in about 1879 and now valued at $125,000 -- were displayed Saturday outside the birthplace of the modern blue jean. The jeans were part of a tribute to Reno tailor Jacob Davis, whose 1871 idea of using rivets to strengthen pants led to one of the world's best known brands: Levi's blue jeans. The city of Reno honored Davis by placing a historical marker on Virginia Street, where his tiny shop once stood.

WASHINGTON - President Obama will reach out to suburban women in the Denver area Wednesday with a message about access to contraceptives - delivered at his rally by Sandra Fluke, a women's rights activist known for her run-in with Rush Limbaugh over the issue this year. Last week, mothers of young children heard Obama's case for reelection when he did a live chat with blogging moms, telling his story of being raised by a single mother and saying: "You, women, should have control over the decisions that affect your health, your lives, your careers.

DALIAN, China - If Horatio Alger had spoken Mandarin he would have loved the rags-to-riches tale of garment maker Li Guilian. A farmer's daughter who got her start stitching aprons in the countryside, she has built a $300-million company that's listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Now 66, Li employs 10,000 workers sewing fine clothing for some of the world's most famous brands and powerful people. Chinese President Hu Jintao and fellow Politburo members are loyal customers of her firm, Dayang Trands.