Invisible Tailor

A customer who ordered a tailor-made suit from Manhattan’s Richard Bennett Associates, Inc. this week got a surprise. He picked out his material and style in the usual way, but the clerk took no measurements. Instead, he led the customer into a room full of mirrors, had him stand near the center. There was a bright flash and his picture was taken. Then a harness of tape measures was draped about his chest and another picture taken. Said the clerk: “That’s all. We’ll mail you your suit in about a month.” There was no fitting of any kind.

In this way, startled customers—and the garment industry—were shown a new technique in suitmaking: the “PhotoMetric method.” Before long, many a hardheaded textileman thinks, the PhotoMetric method will cause something like a revolution in the men’s and women’s suit industry by radically changing tailoring methods.

The Inventor. PhotoMetric is the product of more than two years (and $500,000 worth) of research by Henry Booth, boss of Manhattan’s Amalgamated Textiles Ltd., one of the biggest U.S. jobbers of fine woolens, and its subsidiary, Bennett, Inc. (eleven U.S. stores). Booth, a grandson of England’s famed Salvation Army Founder William Booth, came to the U.S. at 16, worked up in the textile jobbing field. In the depression ’30s he merged five jobbers to form Amalgamated, which later became U.S. distributor for Forstmann Woolen Co. and more than 20 top British mills.

The idea for PhotoMetric came to Booth while he was plowing his Pomfret (Conn.) farm. “I suddenly realized,” said he, “that the clothing industry was plodding along with the same horse-&-buggy techniques of 50 years ago.” The tradition of the industry forced retailers of ready-made suits to keep big inventories to supply only a small range of materials and sizes. In addition, alterations for the hard-to-fit customer cost retailers 6% of their gross. Why not work out a method to eliminate alterations? To Booth the answer was photography—in effect, an application of the Bertillon system. He took the idea to Eastman Kodak Co., which developed the PhotoMetric camera, which anyone can operate.

The Invention. For fast measurement, Booth worked out a system of eight mirrors to reflect all sides of the customer. By focusing the camera on a panel of four mirrors, he was able to get four reflected views on one film: front, rear, side and one from directly overhead. The film is projected on a screen, half lifesize. Tailors read the measurements from the calibrated screen. The measurements are then fed into another Booth invention: the Photo-Metric calculator.

The calculator pairs the measurements with the one suit (out of 500 choices) which most nearly matches them, then automatically calculates the way the suit should be changed at the factory to make that standard suit fit the individual measurements. (Some 500 Manhattan bigwigs, who got “trial-run” PhotoMetric suits, reported excellent fits.)

Money Saver. After Booth has installed PhotoMetric at all his Bennett stores, he will lease the equipment to other retailers (at $75 to $100 a month, plus royalties) and to manufacturers at cost. The retailer will merely have to take the picture and send it to the manufacturer to make the suit. Booth estimates that any retailer with a gross of $50,000 a year can profitably adopt PhotoMetric. The greatest savings will be in alteration costs, inventory, space, insurance, etc. In fact, Booth thinks that anyone can set up in business with a swatch of cloth and a camera, without knowing anything about tailoring.