Custom tailor versed in old traditions will help mark Fashion Week in Goshen

GOSHEN — What Kevin Koch does isn’t new. It’s where he does it that is surprising.

Koch is a textile artist, a custom tailor. For nearly 40 years, he’s put stitches through cloth in a variety of ways and a variety of places around his hometown.

He turns measurements into a pattern and then cuts and sews a piece of clothing. Trousers, vests and sportcoats with expensive silk, wool or tweed are all possible. So are plain coats or button-front pants that Amish or German Baptist Brethren would wear.

This week will be his coming out party as an artist and tailor.

As part of Fashion Week in Goshen to raise money for the renovation of the Goshen Theater, Koch House of Design will have a cocktail party and open house Thursday night. The historical former church building where he works has become a residence. Now it’s the home of Koch and his wife Jeannie and the studio where they make clothing, helped by two of their four adult children and apprentices.

Washington Street is becoming a corridor for artists with businesses offering yarn, soap and floral arrangements here.

“I’m a custom tailor. I’m trained in the very old tradition,” he said as he sat among sewing and embroidery machines and bolts of cloth in his basement workshop.

In 1980, as a recent graduate of Northridge High School, he picked up an order at Jean Lee Originals, which made band and cheerleading uniforms in Goshen. He started a job in the embroidery room and later went to work as an apprentice for Henry the Tailor, a shop operated by Enrique San Juan above the Maley’s store along Main Street.

“I just caught the bug,” said Koch.

He traveled the world, both studying and teaching this old craft. In his own Goshen workshops, he trained people from as far away as Senegal.

By the early 2000s, his business was changing because of mechanization and overseas factory production of cheap clothing. He struggled to find supplies and parts to keep his 90-year-old machines operable.

He almost quit the business in 2003. He took a job at Goshen College, but kept doing work on the side. His craft kept calling to him and during those seven years, he realized the internet could power his business in new ways.

He could use it to connect with other tailors, to sell suits to people from New York to Seattle. Even the suppliers that had gone out of business are being replaced because of a growing interest in bespoke clothing tailored for the wearer.

Most of his work made here has been worn by people living in other places. He doesn’t make much for local residents, though he supplies varsity letter jackets for athletes from a number of local high schools.

He wants to introduce the new generation to the old methods of making clothes.

The teens come to his workshop and are measured for the combinations of felt, leather and embroidery that are then custom made. “I love it when they come in,” he said. He thought his trade was dead, but a new generation is in love with artisan products and that makes him happy.

People who come from other cultures, including Latinos, understand his methods better than many who live here and buy off the rack. The plain communities, as the Amish and conservative Mennonites are called, have a tradition of sewing, though changes in those communities mean more are turning to Koch, he said.

Whether it’s a teen in a letter jacket, an Amish preacher in a straight coat or a model wearing a vest with silk accents, Koch wants to use his craft to make someone look and feel good.

“Good design matters because it touches the heart and character of who’s wearing it. Clothing is an expression of who we are. I wish more people would feel free-er to wear who they are,” he said.

The old craft he practices is being appreciated in new ways. Local residents will get a chance to see it, to touch it, this week. Koch is working on a new line that will be debuted. At age 56, he wonders in new ways what could become of his line of work.

“It’s honestly never been very lucrative, but I’m hopeful it will be,” he said. “You have to invest in where you want to go.”

If you go

“Man of the Cloth” cocktail party

7 to 9 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 21

Koch House of Design

211 E. Washington St., Goshen

Tickets: $50 per person and available at goshentheater.com