100% creation
Julien Tuffery, the link between earth and fashion with the Tuffery workshop
Audio 04:09
Julien Tuffery, 4th generation of tailor-maker and producer of jeans in France © atelier Tuffery
By: Maria Afonso
4 mins
The Tuffery workshop, created in 1892, is celebrating its 130th birthday this year.
Julien Tuffery is the 4th generation to take over the workshop.
Beyond the transmission of craftsmanship, it is also a question of developing the textile industrial tool in France.
It is the marriage between the master jeans tailor of the factory of yesteryear and all the modern tools of a start-up, which makes the Tuffery workshop accessible anywhere in the world.
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What's great about the Web is that geographic isolation no longer exists.
We have a direct link with seven billion potential consumers, so that reshuffles the cards.
It's not because we don't have a Boulevard Haussmann store in Paris that we don't exist today in fashion.
Quite the contrary.
Julien Tuffery, fourth generation of tailor, designer and producer of jeans in France.
Atelier Tuffery © Atelier Tuffery
“It's just the Tuffery Tailor Shop, our family name. »
Julien Tuffery is proud to make, in the middle of rural life, cutting-edge fashion for an urban clientele.
This craftsman's son, a good student, continued his studies in an engineering school.
He started his career in a large international group, despite this position, he has a very strong attachment to the family business.
In 2014, with his wife Myriam, they are in search of meaning and the family factory with the possession of artisanal know-how and a production tool in France responds to a demand for responsible and ethical fashion.
The
130 years of history
of the Tuffery workshop blend with the history of textiles in France.
“Since my great-grandfather, the inventor of canvas trousers from Nîmes, the ancestor of jeans. Post-war: with the appearance of ready-to-wear, the American influence, jeans became trendy. A garment of rebellion, a garment that carried feminism. Women began to wear these men's pants by pinching them at the top or bottom. This was the apotheosis of French textiles. Then there was the crossing of the desert between the years 1985 and 2010, more than 90% of the French textile industry disappeared in 15 years. And now, we have understood that flying the jeans five times around the planet was absurd, so it becomes obvious again to manufacture and consume locally. We are always here ! Finally, with each generation, the family has known a particular period of the Tuffery workshop, but also the history of French textiles. »
Dungarees from the Tuffery workshop © Atelier Tuffery
For Julien Tuffery, the
economy around jeans
goes hand in hand with social and human responsibility.
Innovation in materials, but also in working conditions.
"
In a textile workshop, we demonstrate it every day, jobs are exciting.
On the other hand, it is necessary to train in the competence of the positions, it is long, at least one year of training with us.
We must admit the permanent turnover of teams to constantly change positions, stimulate co-creativity, that is to say that our employees are our best designers.
Well-being at work, no more gloomy manufacturing!
We make beautiful open spaces and instead of putting computers in them, we put sewing machines in them.
All this is very expensive and that is why we are anchored on this model of the producer to the consumer to avoid the erosion of margins through intermediaries.
This allows us to return the final value of the product to the workshop to finance: well-being at work,
concludes
Julien Tuffery.
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