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thirty-nine active applicationsand registrations that used the word “bespoke.” Perhaps some of the applicants had relied on consultants offering bespoke patent strategies.
    True bespoke tailors were also struggling with the new phenomenon of “mass custom” production, which used technology, and cheap labor, to bring made-for-you suits to the masses. On Madison Avenue, a company called My Suit, owned by the South Korean conglomerate BK House, opened a flagship store and launched a website on which customers could design their own suit for less than $1,000. The company’s Mexican factory, capable of producing one million suits a year, could turn a made-to-measure order around in two weeks.
    “It’s like Build-A-Bear for grown men,” James Hancock, the vice president of sales, told
Women’s Wear Daily
.
    Indochino.com , launched by two Canadians in Vancouver, called itself the “fast fashion” option for custom menswear. Its suits are produced in a Shanghai factory, based on measurements that customers take themselves and submit online. There was no middleman and no storefront.
    Of course, getting a decent fit assumes that the customer knows how to use a tape measure on himself—something that is not easy. New technology appeared that aimed to take the human error out of measurements. Body scanners, using technology borrowed from gaming and security-screening technology, popped up in traditional retailers like Brooks Brothers in Manhattan and at upstarts like Tailor Made London. The scanners could produce almost instant digital body maps.
    Tailor Made’s website acknowledged that what it was peddling wasn’t equal to a Savile Row experience or product: “Nothing can surpass the touch, the look, or the feel of bespoke suits,but who really has the time for ponderous measuring sessions and multiple fittings these days? It’s only a bespoke suit after all.”
    Meanwhile, software developers were racing to perfect a system that would use personal computer cameras to create a body map in the privacy of one’s own home.
    To make clear the distinctions between these cut-rate mass-custom producers and their own handmade goods, the tailors knew they had to do a much better job of telling their story. They launched websites, took on marketing consultants—even started blogging and tweeting. Their mission was to recast themselves as luxury brands and to distance themselves from the widely held belief that their industry, however charming, was dying.
    It was their good fortune that the qualities that made them special—their devotion to craftsmanship, their use of sustainable materials, their focus on provenance, their ability to customize, their supply-chain traceability, their very
slowness
—had become selling points in the mid- and post-recession years for a wide variety of products. J. Crew posted videos of Italian leatherworkers making shoes for the American brand on its website and began identifying some of the mills that produced its fabrics for garments featured in its catalogs. Restoration Hardware raised prices and filled its catalog with handmade lamps and tables, accompanied by lush photo spreads of artisans pounding iron and shaping wood, betting on the appeal of craftsmanship. West Elm, another furniture retailer, teamed up with Etsy, a website for vendors of handmade and one-of-a-kind products. Patagonia introduced the Footprint Chronicles, which allows consumers to track the making of, say, a down jacket from a Hungarian duck to a Reno, Nevada, warehouse. Marks & Spencer, the London department store, announced a traceability project called String that wouldtrack every item of clothing it sold from raw material to finished product.
    At the same time, European luxury brands that were founded on craft, as most were, shifted their advertising focus to reflect their handmade pedigree. Gucci launched a traveling Artisan Corner, in which Florentine leatherworkers set up a small workshop in a Gucci store to