Duane MacLeod is a man who likes to work with his hands. Over the course of the 71-year-old’s life, he’s built a home, a sailboat—and now, as he enters his eighth decade— bespoke suits. “I’ve always been a maker sort of person,” says MacLeod, who earlier this year established Hold Fast Bespoke .
The operation is the culmination of a journey that began 12 years ago, when the New Hampshire native began making his own clothing. “Making clothes was just another kind of making exercise, and you just build up your skill set,” MacLeod says of his road to bespoke. “And I think anybody who does that, eventually you’re going to want to tackle a tailored jacket.
It just seems like the goal that you’re going to head towards.” It’s an ambition MacLeod was able to dedicate himself to fully starting in 2022, when he retired from a career in healthcare and enrolled at the Tailoring Academy in Macclesfield, England, an accredited institution established in 2018 by the UK Fashion and Textiles Association and the Savile Row Bespoke Association. Over the next 10 months, MacLeod learned how to draft patterns and sew complex garments by hand as part of the school’s first class of international students beside four other Americans and one French citizen.
By the time he returned to the US, MacLeod had learned to make a bespoke jacket from scratch using traditional tailoring materials like horsehair canvas and domette. But his home base of the last 40 years—the Midcoas.
