Transcript: We Cannot Be Boring

Rob Long brings Google's AI a Cinnabon to prove a point

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

I’ve had the same tailor in New York City for years, which is a sentence that sounds extremely twee, but let me clarify.

I’m not talking about an Anderson & Sheppard, by-royal-appointment-to-some-fancy-boy Savile Row kind of enterprise. I’m talking about a place that will shorten sleeves properly, fix moth holes, and figure out how to let out the waist of a pair of expensive pants without making a lot of judgmental side comments.

Because if, like me, you are occasionally defenseless against the bread basket in restaurants, you often have to get your clothes adjusted to reflect the new reality of whatever it is you’re now carrying around thanks to airport Cinnabons.

Or, maybe, like me, you occasionally mount fortifications against your true nature and declare that, for you, bread is over, like, I don’t even miss it. In which case you need a tailor for that happy (and temporary) triumph.

And the best tailor is one who speaks a complicated foreign language, one in which the words, “Look at what happened to him,” and “We’re going to need stronger thread,” and “Yo-yo dieters like this guy end up having massive heart attacks,” right? Unintelligible to you. It just sounds like gibberish as they measure you up.

Hong Kong Tailor Jack was exactly that place. It was a shabby storefront in an old building in Greenwich Village, actually owned by a man named Jack from Hong Kong. He had the perpetually sad expression and papery skin of someone who lit his first cigarette in 1932 and has been smoking continuously since then.

But he also knew exactly how to fix the cuff of a blazer from the shoulder, and how to politely point out when there was no material left to let out a pair of trousers. In other words, he was a master tailor.