New York ★

The trunk-show capital

A trunk show is a house travelling to its customers: a cutter arrives with cloth books and order forms, takes measurements in a hotel suite or a borrowed showroom, and returns some months later for fittings. New York receives more of these than anywhere else, from Neapolitan, Roman, Parisian, London, Japanese and Korean houses, several of them multiple times a year.

The trade-off is worth understanding before committing. You get access to cutters you would otherwise have to fly to see. You also get a compressed schedule: fittings happen when the house is in town, so a commission that would take four months at home may take a year, and a fitting that reveals a problem may cost you six months rather than a fortnight.

What is still made here

American tailoring has contracted to a small number of firms. Martin Greenfield's Brooklyn factory, Oxxford in Chicago and a handful of independent bespoke tailors, several of them descended from the Italian immigrant trade that once filled the Lower East Side, are what remain of an industry that employed tens of thousands.

The city's other role is retail. Madison Avenue and a few blocks around it hold the American flagships of most of the European houses, which makes New York a good place to see a great deal of finished work in one afternoon.