Everyone I talked to before going to Viet Nam raved about Hoi An and said the “Must Do” is to get clothes made. As soon as I arrived I saw why. The streets are lined with hundreds of tailor shops that will make anything you come up with (well thats the assumption), within a day or 2, at a very reasonable cost.
I need more clothes like I need a hole in the head, but since everyone was doing it I thought I should at least get a few things made (I know, such a conformer, huh?) Amber (an english girl I grew quite close with on the Buffalo Run and ended up traveling the rest of Viet Nam and Cambodia with) is tiny and has a hard time finding clothes at home, so she had a long list of things to get made.
Since all the shops were, seemingly, similar it was tough to choose which one to go to. We went with a shop that’s owned by the sister of a lady that worked at the villa we stayed at. We showed up with just google images of what we wanted. Almost immediately the ladies pulled out a bunch of different fabrics and we went to work designing and taking measurements.
The next day we went back for our fitttings. Unfortunatly, they were out of the fabric I choose for my dress, of course, so I had to choose a new one. They didn’t have that one either! I really wasn’t in love with the patterns so just decided to not have the dress made (I did have a suede skirt made, though). She even took me around on her scooter to other stores to check for fabrics, but finally gave up because 1. I didnt like any and 2. seemed like some kind of sign I shouldnt get it made. Amber’s needed a few tweaks, so the lady told us to come back later.
On the way out I saw, basically, the exact dress I wanted (pattern and all) in the shop next door. Even though I felt like I was cheating on the other lady, I decided to go in and get it made by the new shop (this turned out to be a poor decision). I made a deal with the lady that she would make me the same exact dress I saw, just smaller. She agreed and seemed to understand. I paid her half and was to go back the next day.
Flash forward to the next day: When I tried it on it was BIGGER than the last dress. Confused, I showed her the size differences and asked if she could make the chest area smaller as, for lack of better terminology, I wanted some classy side boob (I did not say that to her, but I showed her how i wanted it to look). She was unamused. Her first reaction was to say “that’s the design, if you make the straps tighter and pull it down in the back it fits”…. it clearly didn’t. She kept refusing, though. After about 5 minutes of this she was full on yelling at me. I was thoroughly confused at this because Amber had had 3 or 4 seperate fittings and each time they were willing to alter the dress to her specifications. After about another 10 minutes of her verbally yelling at me and telling me she wouldn’t make the dress smaller, and her mom in the backroom scremaing something I couldn’t understand in Thai at me, I was fed up and turned to walk out of the store in the dress (since I had already paid half). The lady smacked me and grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back. At that point I whipped around to face her and told her to take her hands off of me (the only time I slightly raised my voice). Not 2 seconds later the entire family emerged from the back room. Mom, daughter, husband etc.. The mom, still yellingg in Thai, said something I interpreted as “ok ok I do for you, take off”. By that she must have meant “ok I’ll make the changes, let me violently rip the dress off you in the changing room because I dont trust you or want to take my eyes off you”
She took the dress to some unknown sweat shop and came back 20 minutes later with the edits. I wasn’t going to dare say it was still a bit too long, but at least I got my side boob… in the classiest form, of course. The store Amber was having her fiting done in even asked if everything was ok next door because they heard all the yelling. All of that over a dress, can you believe it? Geeeshhhh.
The infamous dress
From my trip to Viet Nam I really wasn’t impressed by the vietnamesee people. This experience with the dress is just an example of how they tend to be. Hoi An was, indeed, a lovely city, though. Small enough to ride a bike everywhere and it had a laid back feel to it. We spent about 5 nights there and I easily could have spent a few more.
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