The Fitting Room

What we pinned this cycle, photographed upstairs by north light, on bodies that belong to people we know.

Every six weeks Andriana photographs the new rail in the first-floor fitting room at Tsakalof. Available light only — never strobes, never plug-ins — which means a February shoot takes two days and an August one takes four hours, and that the colour you see is the colour of the cloth in Athens.

The people in the pictures are the people who work here, customers who said yes when asked, and occasionally somebody’s mother. Nobody is a model, nobody is paid, and nothing is retouched beyond dust on the lens. It is not a moral position. It is that a garment photographed on a professional body tells you nothing about how it will sit on yours.

A rail pinned in the first-floor fitting room

Pinned, not styled: what came off the rail before anything was decided.

What the room is for

Pinning before photographing

Every piece is fitted on a real body before it goes online. It is where we find out that a size 38 in one house is a 40 in another, which is why our size guide sometimes contradicts the designer’s.

Finding what does not work

About one piece in nine we buy never reaches the site. It photographs well and wears badly, or it needs an alteration nobody should have to pay for, and it goes back.

Learning the alterations

Konstantinos sits in on the first fitting of anything structured. Half the time he can say in advance which seam will need to move and for whom.

The measurements

What comes out of the room goes into the size guide as actual centimetres — garment measurements, not body ones, because a body measurement tells you nothing about ease.

What you can ask for

Requests we say yes to: photographing a piece on somebody closer to your own height before you buy it, sending you the garment measurements for anything on the site, and telling you honestly which of two sizes we would put you in. Marília answers all three within four hours during shop hours.

The one we say no to is the most common. We will not tell you what size you are. We will tell you what a specific garment measures, what it did on four different people, and which of those people you sound like — and then it is yours to decide, because the alternative is a shop deciding things about your body from an email.