Tailor lives the American dream
Jin Lee’s insistence on perfection lures the hard-to-fit rich and famous to his new Northeastside shop.
By Dana Knight
Indianapolis Star
April 5, 2001
Jin Lee flits. about his custom tailoring shop, a tiny slice of a man.
Men walk in who weigh three times more than he — and tower nearly two feet above his slight frame. They’re famous athletes, men with serious expressions on their faces. Until they see Lee, then they soften.
They’re grateful to Lee because he makes them look good — these men who rarely could find suits that hung just right or that folded perfectly below their ankles.
“He’s measured me in places I’ve never had measured before,” says George McGinnis, 50, former Indiana Pacers and Philadelphia 76ers basketball great. “He’s really good at what he does.”
Lee is in an elite group, one of 25 master tailors in the United States and among fewer than 300 worldwide.
He recently opened his dream shop on 82nd Street at Clearwater Crossing, where he caters to a custom crowd, mostly big and tall men and women but also to the fashion-conscious and those who want the best.
Lee’s shop is loaded with Italian cloths, silks and dark, lavish-looking wood. Angled mirrors and cushy couches welcome clients to the ritzy part of town, a far cry from Lee’s humble beginnings on a farm in South Korea.
Behind the shine of the shop are signs of Lee’s hard work — patterns scattered about, pieces of material hanging over chairs or strewn across the floor. And tucked in the very back is the tiny room where Lee and his four workers hand-sew buttonholes and trim hems.
The toil exacts a price for customers. A suit at Lee’s Custom Tailoring ranges from $650 to $9,000. Lee, who’s unabashedly proud of his work, has no qualms about charging steep fees.
“I am the best around here,” Lee says. “Customers bring in pictures and say, “Jin, can you make this?’ I say, ‘Better than this. No question.’ ”
With that, he whips out his latest piece of work — a breathtaking deep-blue suit with a shiny golden handkerchief sprouting from the pocket. The jacket envelops him, hanging nearly to the floor.
The suit is for the 6-foot-8-inch McGinnis, who now owns GM Supply Co, a distributor of maintenance, repair and operational items. He has been using Lee’s services for five years.
“He’s just a totally different feel,” McGinnis says. “Of course, being as big as I am, it’s kind of hard for me to buy off the rack.”
Big and tall — that’s one reason men are hard to fit for suits. But Lee isn’t shy about discussing his clients’ less-noticeable characteristics. “Most customers (of) mine have unusual bodies,” he says.
As he slips behind a rack of silken suits to a pattern table, he points out one of his more famous regulars: Indiana Pacers star Reggie Miller.
“His waist is too small. His seat is too big,” Lee says.
Being honest is crucial, he says. If a customer’s weight fluctuates even a pound or two, it can alter the entire fit.
So Lee is a perfectionist. When customers come for fittings, he tape-records every visit and takes pictures with his digital camera.
He’s even automated suit- making with his own creation, a computer program called “By Tailors For Tailors.” The program computes patterns, taking into consideration everything from arm length to button distance.
Lee — also a computer whiz — wrote the program, which quickly prints out a detailed pattern for an entire suit, something that used to take Lee as much as a week to draw by hand.
It saves time on the layout, but the work, fitting and adjusting are all crafted by Lee. He jumps on chairs to reach shoulders too high for him, then bends down to pull at the waist. When he wants to check the length, he hops down and drops to his knees.
And when he doesn’t get it perfect after three fittings, he will call the client for a fourth.
His painstaking care allows him to make only three suits a week, but it’s lured such high-profile names as former pro basketball players Clark Kellogg and Billy Knight, and a deal to tailor for the Indiana Pacers.
It also draws clients seeking styles that are difficult to find in Indianapolis.
Rick Spilly, owner of graphics design company RSA Graphics, visited Lee’s shop recently wearing an ensemble that Lee patterned after a picture in a London catalog. The gray pinstriped suit, with vest, featured a tiny ticket pocket along the front side, a fashion trait popular more than a century ago when traveling businessmen needed a place to carry their tickets.
“Around here not only can you not get a lapel vest, you can’t get a vest at all,” said Spilly. “This pocket? Nowhere. It’s just an incredible difference. His stuff is nicer than anything here.”
That kind of praise, Lee says, was earned. And it was something a very young Lee dreamed about as he grew up in the Korean countryside.
“He had ambition, and he didn’t want to be a farmer,” said Charles Chae, an elder at the Korean Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, where Lee is a deacon. Chae often translates for Lee, who is still working to master the English language.
At 13, Lee left the farm and his parents to live in Seoul, where he swept floors at a tailor shop during the day and attended school at night.
There, as he cleaned up after another tailor, Lee envisioned his life’s path.
“I thought, ‘God made me. God doesn’t want me sweeping. God wants a tailor,’ ” Lee says.
So, in 1967, Lee started training to become a master tailor. He worked agonizing hours with another master tailor for more than a decade, learning the intricate stitches and tedious design schemes. Then he was tested.
Lee worked weeks on his final product: a masterpiece suit. He presented it to the Ministry of Labor of the Republic of Korea, which scrutinized every detail and decided Lee was worthy of the honor in 1980. Just a handful of countries — but not the United States — offer such a designation.
Three years later, Lee became the first certified master-tailoring instructor in Korea, a distinction that allows him to train his own master tailors.
But he didn’t stop there. He wanted to practice his art where it would be most appreciated.
“I heard in the U.S. (that) most men wear suits,” he says.
Lee researched, made contacts and shopped around until he found a job in Cincinnati, where he could make suits for a custom-suit manufacturer. He and his wife, Kikum, traveled to the Midwest in 1985.
Six weeks later, Lee was laid off. The company was a manufacturer, and it wanted quantity over quality, Lee says. “I was making six (suits) when they wanted 60,” he said. “I was too careful.”
Lee quickly found a job altering suits at a chain shop in Cincinnati. The shop had a branch in Indianapolis, and Lee was sent here. But he wasn’t using his master tailor qualification and he wasn’t making suits, so nine months later he left.
Lee spent the ensuing years doing alterations and tailoring at various shops. He even owned his own shop in Indianapolis for a short time and, in 1997, leased space to do his own work.
But he held on to the dream of owning a fancy shop and having enough business and income to allow him to train aspiring tailors.
With the opening of the Clearwater shop in January, he says he’s finally there. In a short time, he has drawn a loyal customer base far beyond famous athletes.
Harry Gaunt, owner of Harry Gaunt Jewelers, recently brought in a suit custom-made for him in New York. He wants Lee to replicate it. “Custom-fit, custom style, the best material,” Gaunt said. “He does that, but he gives me New York fashion for Indianapolis prices.”
For other customers, coming to Lee means fewer hassles.
“Everything is perfect when you leave here,” said Herbert Gater Jr., pastor at Greater Galilee Missionary Baptist Church. “When I come to pick things up, I don’t even try it on.”
Lee, who beams as Gater raves about his work, says he wants to branch out across the country. His goal is to set up at least one shop in every state with tailors he either has worked with or trained.
Contact Dana Knight at (317) 444-6012 or via e-mail at dana.knight@starnews.com