The Custom Fashion Trendline · Reading the Research
We read the new luxury-client report so you don’t have to — and pulled the findings that speak straight to the bespoke workroom.
We went through The Business of Fashion and McKinsey’s State of Fashion: Face to Face With Luxury Clients — a survey of more than 2,000 luxury buyers across the US and China — looking for what actually matters at the cutting table.
Most of it is written for the megabrands. But several of its findings point, almost uncannily, straight at the bespoke atelier. The report’s premise is that luxury is climbing out of a long slump into slow growth — roughly 4 to 6 percent a year through 2030 — and that the client who emerges is more selective, more sceptical, and harder to win than before.
A note on scope: the survey covers the US (around $130 billion, the largest market) and China (around $60 billion, the fastest to recover) — the two largest luxury markets, not every region a workroom serves. But the behavioural shifts it documents are the ones reshaping how any client decides a garment is worth it — and a handful of them quietly rewrite the pitch for made-to-measure.
Across both markets, emotional connection is now the number-one driver of what makes a brand desirable, ahead of creativity, heritage and trend. Craftsmanship ranks ninth of ten in the US and tenth of ten in China. Heritage sits right beside it at the bottom.
Read that carefully before you despair. It does not mean clients have stopped caring how a garment is made. It means they now assume it. The report’s own conclusion is blunt: quality and craftsmanship have become the baseline expectation, not the differentiator. When every label claims “hand-finished,” the hand-finishing no longer does the selling.
For the workroom, that’s a lesson about language, not technique. The half-canvas, the hand-padded lapel, the pick-stitching along a lapel edge — keep every bit of it, because it’s the floor you stand on. But stop opening the conversation with it. The report urges brands to move the story away from what the product is and toward who the client becomes by owning it. A tailor is better placed to do that than almost anyone: you are, quite literally, constructing the version of a person they want to present to the world. Sell that.
One useful nuance: craft still earns its keep in one specific place — willingness to pay full price. Its importance as a reason to pay full freight actually rises with spend, reaching 47 percent among established US clients. So craft doesn’t create the desire; it defends the price. Worth separating those two jobs in your own head.
The old engine of exclusivity — scarcity, waitlists, a loud logo — is losing people. Clients increasingly read manufactured scarcity as a tactic rather than a genuine value. What’s replacing it is quieter: recognition by the right people, and a garment that simply can’t be replicated.
One ultra-high-spending American client in the report summed up the mood plainly: she doesn’t want to walk out in the same blazer as everyone else. That refusal to be identical is the entire proposition of a bespoke garment. No megabrand can offer it; you offer nothing but. The report is, in effect, describing a market drifting toward the one thing only made-to-measure can deliver.
An honest caveat: in the US portion of the survey, custom and bespoke services actually ranked lowest among exclusivity cues, where clients still lean toward early access and limited drops. Bespoke reads as exclusive far more clearly in China. But the underlying driver — uniqueness, insider recognition, not-the-same-as-everyone — travels everywhere.
Because clients now distrust artificial scarcity, honest scarcity has quietly become a virtue. The report profiles the revived watchmaker Urban Jürgensen, whose chief executive rejects the industry’s scarcity games outright — his pieces, he says, are “slow to get because they’re slow to make.” That may be the most bespoke sentence in a sixty-five-page luxury report.
Your lead times are not a flaw to be minimised in the sales conversation. They are proof the thing is real.The read for the workroom
The same executive makes a second point worth borrowing: be candid. Give honest estimates, flag delays early, and never dress up a wait as a marketing device. Clients reward the transparency far more than the theatre.
Here the report reads almost like it was written for tailoring. It finds that a single sales associate can elevate or damage how an entire brand is perceived — they’ve become curators of the client relationship rather than order-takers. In the US, the loudest retail complaint is the reverse: pushy tactics and pressure, with clients saying the industry has lost the art of the soft sell.
#2
In China, the shopping experience ranks as the second most important driver of desirability for established clients — the interaction itself now sells.
A bespoke tailor’s core interaction — the unhurried first consultation, the returning fittings, the accumulated memory of a client’s posture and preferences — is the high-touch relationship every megabrand is now scrambling to manufacture. The independent jeweller Jessica McCormack, profiled in the report, describes advisors who know when a client’s wife’s birthday falls and send suggestions six weeks ahead. That isn’t a luxury innovation; it’s a good tailor’s address book. So formalise it: keep proper client records, reach out with genuine intent rather than to tick a box, and guard the softness of the consultation as carefully as you guard your patterns.
The report keeps circling one specific move: brands letting clients see the work. McCormack put her Mayfair workshop directly beneath the shop floor, so clients can wander down and talk to the goldsmiths. The Chinese label ICICLE finishes its signature coats by hand and even livestreams from its factory, precisely to show the human touch in the product.
~30%
of clients say they’d put spare money toward travel before any product — luxury value is shifting from the object to the moment and the memory.
A bespoke commission is already a sequence of moments: the first measure, the toile fitting, the reveal. Treat it as one. Invite the client into the atelier; let them watch the pattern cut, the canvas basted, a buttonhole worked by hand. The finished garment then becomes the souvenir of an experience they chose to have — which is exactly the sort of purchase the report says now endures.
One shift no workroom can afford to ignore: discovery has moved upstream. About half of luxury clients who use AI now use it to explore brands and understand product differences before they ever speak to a human. In China, roughly 60 percent of AI users lean on it mainly to explore products; one client describes a chatbot that knows her measurements and skin tone well enough to hand her a colour plan.
~½
of AI-using luxury clients rely on it to explore brands and understand products — before they set foot in your fitting room.
The practical read is simple. Clients increasingly arrive with opinions already formed — fabric ideas, silhouette references, sometimes AI-generated mood boards. Meet that rather than resist it. And the tools cut both ways: digital measurement and visualisation are becoming part of how a modern atelier consults, tightens the fitting process and reduces remakes. The craft stays analogue; the path the client takes to reach it is going digital.
The report closes on a question it says every brand must now answer: beyond the products you make, what makes the relationship with your brand irreplaceable? For most of the industry, that’s a hard and expensive question. For a bespoke tailor or couturier, it’s the description of an ordinary Tuesday.
A garment cut to fit one body, made inside a relationship built over years, witnessed in the making — that is precisely the irreplaceable relationship the rest of the luxury market is now trying to buy its way back toward. Worth keeping in your back pocket for the next client who hesitates at the price.
Source: The Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company, The State of Fashion: Face to Face With Luxury Clients (2026). Figures and findings are drawn from that report; the workroom interpretations are our own. Charts are our own visualisations of the report’s published data.
We’re always interested in how custom fashion brands like yours are navigating change. Let’s keep the conversation going..