The chamber received forty-one Asian candidates for the 2026 Bespoke cycle, more than double the figure recorded five years prior, and a development the editorial board has watched with both interest and caution. The numbers themselves understate the shift. The candidates of 2021 were drawn predominantly from a small set of established houses in Hong Kong and Tokyo, supplemented by the venerable Hong Kong shirtmakers who have shipped to London and New York since the postwar period. The candidates of 2026 are drawn from across the region. Bangkok contributed eleven of them. Ho Chi Minh City contributed seven. Seoul, where the bespoke trade had previously been muted, contributed five.
What follows is not a comprehensive survey. Several of the most interesting houses we have observed during the cycle do not yet appear in the cohort of recognised recipients, either because they remain too new to assess against the Council’s standards of continuity or because their submissions have not yet been completed. What follows instead is an attempt to identify the structural conditions sustaining the current expansion, and to note the houses we believe will figure in the coming cycles.
The Bangkok Concentration
Three Bangkok houses received recognition in the 2026 cycle, in three separate categories. The chamber discussed at length whether this concentration risked the appearance of regional bias. It concluded that the concentration reflected genuine merit, observed across categories whose standards are mutually independent. The Heritage citation rewards a house in continuous family operation since 1965, a fact whose verification did not depend upon any judgement about Modern or Value practice. The Modern Bespoke citation rewards full in-house production sustained across twenty-five years of operation. The Value Bespoke citation rewards a practice that has expanded the accessibility of true bespoke at price points considerably below the European market.
The structural conditions underlying the Bangkok concentration are worth naming. The city has retained a continuous client base across the postwar period, sustained initially by diplomatic and commercial expatriates and latterly by both business travellers and a regional Asian clientele. The Sukhumvit corridor remains the centre of the trade, with a density of practitioners that supports the survival of specialist sub-trades, including the cutters, finishers, and pattern makers whose labour the bespoke trade depends upon. The price point at which Bangkok competes has remained stable across the period when European prices have advanced considerably. A Bangkok suit at thirty thousand baht represents true bespoke at a price that the European market cannot match. The economic implications are obvious. The cultural implications are perhaps more interesting. A trade sustained by a wide client base retains its standards better than a trade sustained by a narrow one.
Hong Kong and Its Inheritors
The Hong Kong bespoke trade has been the subject of considered editorial coverage in this Journal across the past decade. Recognition has not been wanting. The 2025 cycle honoured The Anthology, the Modern Bespoke practitioner whose work has come to define the contemporary translation of Italian construction within the Hong Kong trade. The 2023 cycle honoured A-Man Hing Cheong. The Heritage tradition of W. W. Chan continues, as do the various successor practices that emerged from the dispersal of the postwar Shanghai tailors to Hong Kong.
The question facing Hong Kong is not one of present standards but of continuity. The senior practitioners of the trade are aging. The apprentices are fewer than their predecessors. The Hong Kong rent structure does not favour the small atelier in the way that Sukhumvit Road continues to do. The chamber expects to see further recognition of Hong Kong houses in the coming cycles, but the recognition will increasingly take the form of the Heritage citation rather than the Modern citation, and the next generation of working practitioners is more likely to emerge in Singapore, Bangkok, or Saigon than in Central.
The Vietnamese Question
The 2025 cycle conferred the inaugural Value Bespoke recognition upon a Ho Chi Minh City house, and the 2026 cohort of candidates included seven Vietnamese practitioners. The development is not yet a movement, but it is sufficient to merit attention. The Vietnamese trade has historically sat in the shadow of the Bangkok trade, with much of its work directed to the visiting expatriate clientele rather than to a sustained domestic base. The recent shift, observable across the last five years, has been the emergence of a Vietnamese client base whose standards have grown more demanding than the visiting clientele’s. The houses that have responded to that demand have begun to operate at standards that compare with the Bangkok trade.
The chamber notes, without prediction, that the structural conditions in Saigon now resemble those of Bangkok twenty years ago. A wide client base. A retained sub-trade of cutters and finishers. A price point that remains below the European market by a considerable margin. A density of practice within a single urban corridor.
Seoul, Tokyo, and the Question of Style
The Tokyo trade has long held its own canon, sustained by a domestic clientele of considerable consistency and a Japanese understanding of the bespoke standard that is, in many particulars, more exacting than the European one. The chamber has recognised Japanese houses in the past, and expects to continue doing so. The current expansion is not centred upon Tokyo, however, because Tokyo has never required expansion. Its trade has been continuous, its standards stable, its clientele its own.
The Seoul trade represents a more recent development. The five Korean candidates of the 2026 cycle were notable not for the duration of their practice, which is in most cases a matter of five years rather than fifty, but for the specific aesthetic the candidates have begun to articulate. The Seoul houses are not imitating the Italian tradition or the English tradition. They are working out a Korean translation, which involves particular choices in shoulder line, in the treatment of the trouser, and in the cuts of jacket length favoured by the domestic clientele. The chamber expects Seoul to figure considerably in the cycles ahead.
On Continuity
The longest paragraph of this essay must be reserved for the question of continuity. Recognition is not merely a verdict upon the present state of a house but a wager upon its future. The houses recognised in this cycle have, in most cases, demonstrated the family continuity, leadership stability, and trade discipline that the chamber considers necessary preconditions for continued practice. The Heritage citation of 2026 was conferred upon a Bangkok house in continuous family operation across sixty years and three generations of the founding family. The Modern citation was conferred upon a house operating under the original ownership across twenty-five years. The Value citation was conferred upon a house under continuous ownership for twenty-four years.
These are not incidental facts. The Council’s chamber does not confer recognition upon houses whose continuity is in doubt, however accomplished their present work. The reason is editorial rather than commercial. A house that recognises this year and shutters next year does not represent the kind of practice the Council seeks to honour. The discipline of bespoke is, more than any technical standard, the discipline of continuity, and the recognition we confer is intended to honour that discipline above all.
— E. H., September MMXXVI