The vanishing world of Cairo’s master tailors

Cairo, home to 23mn people, is a whirling fever dream of noise, traffic and a mishmash of once grand Egyptian-European buildings — though perhaps not a city that immediately brings to mind the world of high fashion. But in the 19th century, when Cairo rivalled London for its nightlife and set fashion trends before they went to Paris, it also possessed a formidable artisan class of tastemakers. Chief among them was a coterie of European-trained master tailors, whose ateliers were clustered in the central area of West El Balad, known as Downtown.

A few of the ateliers remain today, fading reminders that the area was once the centre of gravity for the social and political life of the country. Changing fashion, modernisation and a lack of willing apprentices mean the craft is threatened with extinction.

One of the last people in Cairo who knows how to design and make a bespoke suit by hand is Samir El Sakka. At 89, he is the city’s oldest and most revered master tailor, and stands as perhaps the last living steward of his craft. Most of his contemporaries and many of his clients have died. He’s survived revolutions, coups, economic crises and Covid, which shuttered his business and almost killed him. But he still loves coming to work to meet his clients; many travel from across the city to have their clothes hand-fitted and cut by him and his small team.

I meet El Sakka at his atelier in an ailing art deco building. Originally it was at ground level next door but, frightened by the street battles of the 2011 revolution, he moved to one of the upper floors.

Mannequins wearing day jackets occupy the corridors. In an adjacent room two workers manoeuvre a 9kg electric iron in mid air, carefully pressing the shoulder of a blazer. They call this method “modern” because the previous one they used was powered by hot coal. El Sakka sits opposite me behind a small desk surrounded by photos that narrate the story of his life and the many eras, cultures and people that have shaped his craft and the city itself.

In 1956, when El Sakka’s father, also a tailor, died suddenly, the family was left to decide what to do with the atelier. Samir was a student at Cairo University and recalls: “I had no interest or knowledge of the work.”

Initially, the family hired someone to oversee the business, which at the time employed 20 labourers and made suits for the pashas (high-ranking officials) and palace staff. When that didn’t work out, El Sakka’s older brother Mohamed, an army officer, said he would take over. But his friend Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had led a coup to oust the monarchy in 1952 and would later become president, refused the idea of Mohamed leaving the army, suggesting Samir take over instead.

Samir agreed because he “wanted to learn the craft abroad”, and went to Italy to study design and cutting at the Santarelli & Castellucci Institute in Rome. He also spent time observing the process at Cifonelli, a store known for its bespoke tailoring. But what stayed with him were the words his instructors had imparted. “You are a tailor, you are an artist,” he explains. “They taught me there is great respect in what I do.”

El Sakka returned to Cairo in 1958. “People started to like me . . . when they saw my work was precise,” he says. Soon the atelier and the parties he hosted became a place to have clothes made and to be seen. Actors and politicians started coming, although celebrities made for difficult clients: one of Egypt’s most celebrated actors refused to pay a mounting bill, telling El Sakka that his patronage was enough. “Since then, I stopped working with famous people,” he says.

Then competition with other tailors began. A directory from 1957 lists dozens of men’s tailors, known as tarzi in Egyptian Arabic, around 10 of whom were renowned. “I became one of them . . . that was the beginning,” he says.

One of those was his late friend Hassan Swellam, a master tailor who had studied in France and opened a store nearby on Adly Street in 1954. If El Sakka eschewed celebrities, then Swellam courted them. The custom safari suit he designed for Nasser became a symbol for the new republic’s elite, who were eager to distinguish themselves from their predecessors, and one of his signature designs is still available in the store. But it was Swellam’s work with Anwar Sadat during his presidency (from 1970 until his assassination in 1981) that made him famous.

Swellam died in 2018 aged 95. But his daughters Ola and Azza have kept his atelier as it has been for the past 70 years. It’s an old-world space that brings to mind a Wes Anderson film, with its retro burgundy scalloped Venetian curtains and perfectly arranged sets of leather slippers and striped pyjamas.

These days they sell ready-to-wear and tailored suits made by Swellam’s former assistant using machine and hand construction. The sisters say they are committed to keeping the business going. They hope that salvation lies in renewed interest from a younger generation and overseas visitors to Egypt. Eugenio Frignani from Venice recently had a suit tailored using English wool fabric he bought in Florence. He hoped the more affordable cost of tailoring in Egypt would offer others “the chance to experience something that culturally is really fading away, but is also incredible . . . It’s really something that enriches you, because you need to think about all the details.”

In a city where tradition and modernity are constantly crashing into each other, the fate of the tailors reflects the current state of the Downtown area, hovering between a glorious past and an uncertain future. Many Cairenes have moved out of the centre to compounds in satellite cities, draining the area of its original clientele, and changes to an old rent law will mean commercial rents rise significantly over the next five years. Under the previous law, tenants passed down contracts between generations, often paying tiny rents of less than £1 a month. The change has stirred fears of gentrification that could make it unaffordable for historic businesses to remain in the area.

Mamdouh Gamal, a third-generation bespoke shirtmaker, is at the precipice of this uncertain moment. He lives in Al Shorouk, a satellite city east of Cairo, but commutes to manage the shirtmaking business started by his father in 1949 when the neighbours were a mix of Egyptians, Italians, French, Greeks and Armenians, and the atelier heaved with orders. A small order for Fouad Serageldin — then a prominent politician — consisted of 24 shirts, 12 pyjamas, four robes and 48 pairs of underwear.

More recently, Gamal, who learnt to design shirts in Paris, was able to sustain the business by cultivating a following of embassy staff mostly from South American nations. But he fears for the future. An economic crunch has made it more expensive to buy fabric and import buttons and thread, and his rent has increased under the new law. Currently he employs two men in their sixties who take two weeks to produce a bespoke shirt. But without apprentices or a successor he says he will soon be forced to close.

Samir Raafat, a historian, remembers “the ritual” of going to the tailor with his father, and later had his own shirts made by a bespoke shirtmaker, who has since closed up shop. He attributes the decline to changing fashion but says it was the flooding of the market with ready-to-wear that signalled the death knell of bespoke clothing. “When prêt-à-porter arrived in Egypt it changed the fashion scene completely,” he says. “Suddenly our language became ‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’.”

Raafat feels bereft about the lack of documentation on the tailors and dressmakers who shaped the sartorial identity of the city, and then just as quickly slipped away. “They made movies on the great European designers, but nobody told the story of Swellam or Madame Rita,” he says of a dress designer who was “the Elsa Schiaparelli of the southern Mediterranean”.

In an era of fast fashion, the tailor’s craft stands as a quiet counterpoint. “When I see a suit, I can sense whether the tailor was interested or not,” says El Sakka. There are no computers; measurements are stored on paper and appointments are made by phone. A suit takes around 10 days to make, including fittings, but there is a three-month wait.

Today the biggest existential threat to the craft is a lack of apprentices willing to take on this demanding work. Yet there may still be hope. El Sakka has been training a successor. Osama Fouad, 46, has been working with him since he was 17. These days he oversees the atelier, wielding the cutting scissors El Sakka inherited from his father.

For Fouad, the craft is both deeply personal and collaborative, with each consecutive step dependent on the work of the person who came before. “The nature of this job,” he says, is that it’s “the work of friends — there has to be a group sitting together helping each other”.

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