Can an unknown Hoi An tailor create a fashion fantasy in seven hours?

In the ancient Vietnamese town of Hoi An, between the 1000-year-old blue stone temples and the mustard-yellow pagodas, a seamstress is at work in an old tailor shop.

Shopping for a tailor in Hoi An can be an overwhelming experience.Credit: iStock

Every generation in human history has had its own paragon of female beauty and Pamela Van has less than seven hours to realise mine. My tiny, demure designer is trained for pernickety Westerners so she is indulging my whim for a work dress that glows at cocktail hour and still shimmers at breakfast.

“I don’t mind looking younger, even a bit plumpalicious,” I explain, “but I don’t want to look muttony.” Pamela laughs. That’s a relief. We understand each other. We glide past a mannequin draped in dreamy blooms of organza cut along sweeping architectural hemlines.

“I could probably do with a ballgown as well,” I add.

Bespoke fashion is being shaped upstairs at Yaly Couture. Needles are clack-clacketing and fans whirring in the faces of 100 tailors bent low over sewing machines. A quality controller on patrol guarantees flawless creations, nipping threads, checking button-holes at break-neck speed.

Yaly Couture is a purveyor of quality bespoke fashion in Hoi An.Credit: Alamy

There’s a slower pace downstairs where I’m seated on a lounge next to a table piled with style catalogues. I start flipping pages but I don’t have a perfect bikini bottom like the humans staring back at me and I’ve lost the confidence to be experimental. Pamela apprehends indecision and shepherds me into a room stacked floor-to-ceiling with colourful bolts of fabric patterned in blossoms and butterflies.

I like coral; Pamela prefers navy. “Very classic,” she says, leading me into a curtained cubicle where a ready-made wrap-around frock hangs on a hook. There’s nothing Pamela doesn’t know about seams, plackets, interfacing and waistbands so she’s soon skewering pins into fabric, swiping chalk on sleeves at elbow, tucking hem at knee. “Now you go,” she says. “Final fitting in three hours.”

There are many ways to explore Hoi An, a UNESCO-World Heritage site on a tributary of the Thu Bon River, in Central Vietnam. I could drift away in a coracle, a circular bamboo fishing boat designed centuries ago, or weave away from the tourist trail on a bike. The town is a uniquely atmospheric place with merchant houses and ornate temples from coexisting Asian cultures dating back to the 1700s. Streets are festooned with silk lanterns, especially during the monthly lantern festival but, even with all this, it is hard to beat the enduring craft of traditional tailoring for capturing spirit of place.

Hoi An is a uniquely atmospheric place.Credit: iStock

Good tailoring isn’t only the preserve of young aristocrats dashing along Savile Row in London or down the Via del Corso in Rome. Vietnam has been spinning and selling silk to foreign traders for centuries and more than 400 tailors ply their trade in Hoi An.

Few travellers can resist a bespoke suit at a bargain price but plenty get stitched up by dodgy operators using cheap materials, so I’m grateful to my guide for his recommendation. “You get what you pay for,” Dao Ngoc Minh says, when we rendezvous outside the couturier to continue our town tour.

Minh strides through the old quarter like a land-owner surveying an inherited estate, past banana pancake carts and pots of steamed pig brains, to the house of the white rose dumpling (banh bao banh vac). In the kitchen, women knead the delicate rice-flour envelopes stuffed with shrimp that have been prepared by a single Chinese-Hoianese family, using water from a specific well, for centuries.

Vietnam has been spinning and selling silk to foreign traders for centuries.

We zig-zag into the tiny two-century-old Tan Ky house with intricately carved columns and open-roof courtyard and have barely begun to consider the wall marked with high flood levels when Minh says time is up.

The tailor shop is abuzz with tourists fitting into skirts and shirts now. A woman who looks like a Russian oligarch’s wife, Gucci shoes and all, is delighted by her ’80s zip-front blouson jacket but fussing over her husband’s tuxedo.

Pamela is beaming – my garment is no longer a puzzle of pretty pieces. Let the seraphim sing their hallelujahs, for her mercurial spin of inexpensive ingenuity is not a rehash, it’s a mix of east and west. A precision-crafted sculpture in silk with a tie across the waist line gives illusory emphasis to the bust line. Nice cleavage, I think, rather surprised to see it there.

“Never underestimate the power of a flimsy piece of silk,” I say.

Pamela escorts me arm in arm to the door. She’s standing there, waving still, as I turn the corner in dwindling twilight. Three hours later, the blue silk dress arrives at my hotel, wrapped in an unpretentious paper bag.

A week later, a well-dressed colleague slides up to the cocktail bar at an elegant gathering in Sydney. “Is that a Bianca Spender?” she asks.

“No,” I smile. “It’s a Hoi An, Pamela.”

Tour

Adventure World provides authentic experiences customising each trip to suit discerning travellers. Spend eight days discovering the essence of Vietnam from Saigon to Hoi An to Halong Bay. From $3040. See adventureworld.com.au

Yaly Couture is a bespoke tailor for women and men. See yalycouture.com

Stay

Boutique Anantara Hoi An Resort is less than a kilometre walk away from the historic quarter. From $416. See anantara.com/en/hoi-an

The writer was a guest of Adventure World.