A workshop that manufactures and repairs clothes in the historic centre of Thessaloniki

The photographs depict part of Mrs. Aliki’s workshop. Visible in the photograph are the workbench used for cutting textiles and a wall covered in sewing patterns, the designs Mrs. Aliki uses to cut fabric into segments which will then be sewn together to construct the garment. Mrs. Aliki is about 60 years old and has been working in the clothing sector, first as a seamstress and then as a businesswoman, from a very young age. She came to Thessaloniki from a nearby village and soon after her arrival found work as an apprentice seamstress in a large company of the historic centre, while also attending tailoring classes at a public school in the evenings. Before long, she also managed to graduate from night school. For a few years, she stayed at a boarding house for young women, but soon her parents and the rest of her family also resettled in Thessaloniki.

In an interview, Mrs. Aliki discusses those first years of moving to Thessaloniki at the beginning of the 1970s, a time when many young women left their family homes in villages to work in cities. She says she chose tailoring because it was a job she had loved since she was 12. After she got married, she had to work from home for a while, a common practice among women workers in the decades between the 1970s and the 1990s. That’s how she started taking on manufacturing contracts using a sewing machine in one of the bedrooms in her house. This lasted for a year, until her husband began having problems at work and they decided to open their own women’s clothing manufacturing business during the 1980s.

Her husband was not familiar with tailoring techniques, but with practice he learned how to cut out the pattern pieces for the garments. Mrs. Aliki and her husband started this business with very little seed capital and the interviewee states that for years they had to work six days a week, from 7 or 8 in the morning until 11 o’clock at night. Twice a year they would show samples of their collections for the following seasons and participate in trade exhibitions in Athens, where retail clothing sellers could learn about the new designs and choose the manufacturers they would order clothes from for the next season.

However, as Mrs. Aliki says, by the end of the 1990s, it was becoming increasingly doubtful that retail sellers across the country would be paying off their debts to manufacturers. This was a time of severe contraction for the sector, with many manufacturing businesses in Thessaloniki and Northern Greece closing down. That’s when Mrs. Aliki and her husband decided they needed to adapt and diversify if they wanted their business to remain viable, so they went into making bespoke formalwear. They created custom-made evening gowns, wedding and reception outfits, even some wedding dresses. Mrs. Aliki had the skills and experience necessary to create formalwear since she had worked for years at a large formal clothes manufacturer. As she says, ‘My garments were worn not only in Greece, but also in receptions abroad, events attended by Clinton or Berlusconi. The fabrics I used and the type of tailoring attest to the quality of the clothes we made’.

However, the clothing manufacturing and trading sector was upended yet again during the period 2009-2012 [see EKT020] and Mrs. Aliki had to once more change her company’s mode of operation. She reports that, ‘We kept getting orders, but they were dwindling, so I started taking on mending work. I would never have stooped so low in the past, but I even agreed to mend curtains’.

After the collapse of the country’s credit rating and the outbreak of the economic crisis from 2009 onwards, Greek society was hit by a torrent of harsh measures including, but not limited to, salary cuts for public servants, pension cuts, new property taxes, and a sharp rise in indirect taxes. Cumulatively, these measures caused a recession which had a domino effect across the entirety of Greek society and economy. From that time onwards until today, numerous garment mending workshops have cropped up everywhere in Thessaloniki, while the generalised crisis in the clothing sector led to a dramatic drop in sales, mass business closures, and a huge rise in the rate of unemployment, which reached 28% in July, 2013.