Tailoring
Our house style incorporates what we feel are each tailoring tradition's strengths - such as lightness, neatness, and precision - into a style that is suitable for Hong Kong, yet classically founded.
Prologue began with an idea that good tailoring needn’t be flamboyant nor exaggerated and must be purpose built for the occasions or environments it was intended for. Considering Hong Kong’s typically sweltering and humid environment, the house cut began with stripping away construction to reduce the weight of typical Hong Kong tailoring with the removal of the chest piece, shoulder pads and lining. This is reminiscent of southern Italian tailoring with Naples being most famous for jackets that feel like cloth thrown over one’s shoulders. To an extreme however, this can appear disheveled and unkempt, and will often be considered unprofessional for the salaryman.
​
As such, the jacket fronts had to be pared down while retaining some visual interest. This moves the house style further north to Florence, renowned the world over for its symmetrical fronts and sweeping quarters that, when combined with a classic jacket length, elongates the body while leaving enough of the trouser visible so as not to shorten the leg line. The last piece of the puzzle draws from Asian tailoring heritage with precision and intricate finishing. Redolent of the Shanghainese qipao, pick-stitching, bar-tacks, and buttonholes are painstakingly sewn by hand to assemble, reinforce, and decorate garments bearing the Prologue marque.
Collectively, the above defines the first version of the Prologue cut with reducing weight and structure to a bare minimum becoming the primary focus. This obsession with minimising weight introduced a number of compromises – beginning with a featherweight canvas that offered remarkable spring, but lacked give, displaying ease or drape with deep, sharp folds. Combined with the removal of domettes and wadding, the canvas relied on machine stitching to attach to fine cotton fabric, which would help prevent stray hairs from piercing through linings and grazing the wearer’s flesh. This canvas preparation meant that the jacket fronts tended to be relatively stiff despite their light weight and at times appeared to lack the fluidity of beautiful tailoring.
​
Without much body, the canvas also did not allow shoulder extension, and structured sleeveheads would droop. As such, the early shoulder relied on an interpretation of the Neapolitan manica camicia, which turns the sleeve and shoulder inlays inward to the top of the wearer’s shoulder joint with a generous sleevehead that splays over the deltoids. At the time, a lower buttonstance was preferred and so the central button was positioned close to the navel to reduce the visual length of the torso. This also tended to require a mismatched hip pocket height from the jacket’s bottom buttons.
