It is 7:14 in the morning and Don Ramiro Vega is rolling out a length of black wool on a cutting table older than two of his children.
The shop is on 22nd Street between Mission and Capp. There used to be three mariachi tailors in this part of the city. Two have closed in the last six years. Don Ramiro’s sign, hand-painted by his late wife in 1989, still reads “Sastreria Vega: Trajes a la Medida.”
“My father taught me,” he says, in Spanish, then adds in English, “and his father taught him. We do not have a school. We have a kitchen table and a lot of patience.”
A custom traje takes between 80 and 110 hours of labor. The buttons are silver, the trim is hand-laid, and the fabric must be wool because cotton wrinkles under stage lights. Don Ramiro charges between $1,800 and $4,500 depending on the embroidery. He has not raised his prices since 2019.
His three children, all grown, all in different states, do not agree on what to do with the shop. His daughter Lupita wants to franchise. His son Esteban wants to close it and put Don Ramiro in a smaller storefront on Valencia where rent is half. His youngest, Ana, has stopped saying anything.
Don Ramiro shows me a customer’s name in a leather-bound ledger going back to 1995. The man came in at age 14 to be measured for his quinceañero outfit. He came back at 23 for his wedding suit. Last fall he came back to be measured for the suit he’ll wear in his casket.
“You think a tailor measures a body,” Don Ramiro says, putting the ledger back. “He measures a life.”
Outside, a delivery truck for the Starbucks two doors down honks at a double-parked Tesla. Don Ramiro does not look up. He picks up his shears.
