Methodology

The record model

Every subject on this site (a house, a shoemaker, a mill, a cloth, a technique, a city, a term) is one record in a structured database, plus its relationships to other records. Prose is attached to the record rather than the reverse. This is what allows a comparison table, a price list and a city page to be generated from the same verified fields, and it is why they cannot contradict one another.

The database currently holds 470 records and 104 price observations.

Sourcing

Sources are used in this order of preference:

Primary: a house's own published material, company registries and filings, official trade-body listings.
Institutional: museum catalogues and archive collections, particularly for historical garments and textiles.
Books: the standing literature on tailoring, shoemaking and textiles.
Independent reporting: named publications with an identifiable author, where the piece is not a paid placement.
Interviews and workshop accounts, where the speaker is named.

Content produced by other AI systems is never used as a source. Neither is an aggregator that does not name where its own information came from.

Confidence

Maker records carry a confidence level, and it means something specific:

High: the core construction and service facts come from the house itself or from a primary document, and have been checked within the past year.
Medium: assembled from independent reporting and consistent secondary material, with no direct contradiction found.
Low: the subject is documented thinly. The record is published because an incomplete record with its gaps marked is more useful than none, but treat the detail as provisional.

Prices

A price is stored with the currency it was published in, the date it was observed, and one of three bases:

Official: the figure was published by the house itself, and the source URL points at it.
Reported: a named publication carried the figure, and the citation names it.
Estimated range: an indicative band compiled by the editors from publicly reported figures, carrying the date of compilation rather than a claim to be a quotation. Most bespoke entry prices on this site are of this kind, because most bespoke houses do not publish a price list. A band is not a quotation and no house is bound by it.

Dollar equivalents exist only so that a table can be ordered; the rate and its date are stored with the row. Prices normally exclude tax, and bespoke prices normally exclude cloth beyond the house bunch; where a source states the treatment, the page says so.

A price older than twelve months is marked wherever it appears and appears on the editors' review queue. We do not silently restamp dates. If a figure cannot be re-verified it stays visible with its original date rather than being quietly deleted, because a dated fact is still a fact.

When a page is allowed to be indexed

Search engines are only shown pages that carry enough to be worth arriving at. Each record is scored on the length and substance of its prose, the number of structured facts, its relationships to other records, its sources and its images; below a threshold the page stays reachable on the site but is marked noindex. Generated list pages (a city crossed with a discipline, a price band, a decade) must have at least four members and their own explanatory text before they are indexable at all.

This is a deliberate constraint on growth. A page that would consist of a title and three database rows is not published to search, however much traffic the query might carry.

Reading depth

Important pages are written three times: a plain-language summary of a few sentences, a general explanation, and a technical section. This is not padding. Each is a different answer to the same question, and the technical section frequently contradicts the simplification, which is said explicitly where it happens.

What we do not do

Invent a founding year, price, client, production location, fitting count or quantity of handwork. Where a fact is not documented, the field is empty and says why.
Present subjective assessment as measurement. Opinion is separated from the record and follows the published assessment method.
Reproduce another publication's article. We link out.
Use a photograph whose licence we cannot verify, or generate one.