For eleven-year-old Mehmet Celil, the Netherlands was a country he heard a lot about. That was in the village where he lived in the Hatay region, quite a distance from Istanbul. In the Netherlands you could find work, you could earn money there. Celil came from a large family of five boys and four girls, he had to take care of the livestock and therefore his father did not allow him to study. But young Mehmet apprenticed with his brother Aziz, who worked in the textile industry in Istanbul. There Mehmet put snaps on military uniforms.
Brother Aziz left for Austria in the early 1970s. Mehmet heard from colleagues – he was now working for a company that made socks – that it was better for him to go to the Netherlands than to Austria or Germany: there was plenty of employment in the Dutch textile industry and you could earn more money there.
That's how Mehmet (62) ended up here. Since 2009, the Celil family has had its own repair workshop and dry cleaners on Van Woustraat, in the Amsterdamse Pijp. Libas is called the narrow, deep store. His sons also work here. Before he became an independent tailor, he was, among other things, head of a fashion studio for stores such as C&A, Vera Moda and Miss Etam.
The story of Mehmet Celil is the story of many. It falls on. Why do so many tailors in the Netherlands have a Turkish background?
The Golden Scissors
Nowadays the tailor stands for a growing environmental awareness; a more sustainable alternative to our habit of immediately throwing away damaged clothing.
There are more than a hundred tailors in Amsterdam alone, and at least 1,500 in the rest of the country, according to the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce does not know exactly how many of the entrepreneurs have a Turkish background, but there are an above-average number. You usually recognize them by the facade decoration and lettering in blue and white. They are often located in working-class neighborhoods, not only in Amsterdam, but also in The Hague, Utrecht, Rotterdam and smaller towns. They are sole proprietorships or studios where a family works together. They have names like De Zilveren Schaar, De Gouden Schaar, De Oranje Schaar, De Meetlat, or something with the owner's name in it: Clothing Repair Uzun, Tailor Ekerbicer, Atelier Ayat.
Here you have a button sewn on, a pair of trousers taken in, and a new zipper inserted. Here you can have a jacket, coat or wedding dress made to measure, they do leather and suede repairs, they repair curtains or even the sails of a sailing boat.
Underground circuit
It is no coincidence that the Celil brothers' story begins in their seventies. Due to a shortage of workers in (among others) the textile industry and sewing workshops, Dutch and German employers recruited cheap workers in countries such as Turkey, Italy and Morocco from the 1960s onwards. Dutch people often did not want to do this work. An influx of guest workers – as labor migrants were called at the time – started. They were often unskilled and worked ten-hour days, six days a week.
Amsterdam was the fashion capital of the Netherlands at that time. There were many clothing workshops on the western canal belt, the so-called 'fashion canals'. A huge industry flourished here, thousands of people worked there. De Bijenkorf was there, C&A, Peek&Cloppenburg, V&D, the fashion houses of Lampe and Witteveen. They were the regular customers of, for example, ready-made clothing from Anco, on Keizersgracht.
In the east of the country, the Twente cities of Almelo, Hengelo and Enschede were dominated by the smoking chimneys and the characteristic sawtooth roofs of factories with spinning looms and weaving mills, including the large Ten Cate. Cottage industries have traditionally thrived in this region, just like in Oss, Veghel and Geldrop in Brabant.
However, at the end of the 1970s, many jobs were lost in Dutch industry, and certainly also in textiles. Work was moved to low-wage countries in Asia and, closer, Poland. There was hardly any work left for Turkish migrant workers who had come to the Netherlands for the textile industry.
A new, underground circuit of sewing workshops emerged, mainly in Amsterdam. In the 1980s the city had about a thousand companies, where twenty thousand illegal immigrants worked. The tolerance policy allowed this until 1993. From that year onwards, illegality was tackled harshly and the studios were evacuated. Workers without visas were sent back to Turkey.
Centuries-old tradition
Atilla Kiliç (64) from Tailors of Amsterdam on the Elandsgracht, founded in 1978, experienced it all. In addition to the studio, he has a boutique for second-hand vintage clothes. “In the 1970s I worked day and night for Amsterdam companies,” he says. “I had followed my father, who worked as an unskilled worker in the Netherlands. The workshops attracted many Turkish tailors. But in the end they were unable to hold their own against the large firms in low-wage countries, and unemployment soared. Our own, independent tailor's shop was the last resort for me and for many others: after all, we had the professional knowledge and experience.”
According to Kiliç, the fact that Amsterdam became a clothing city was due to the fact that wage costs were initially low due to illegality. The Amsterdam fashion houses were also able to respond to changes in the fickle fashion world, where trends follow each other at lightning speed, thanks to the short lines of communication with the studios.
Kiliç has now been working in the textile sector for about forty years. He learned the craft in his native country, as a ten-year-old, from his aunt. He did small jobs for her, after school or during the summer holidays. She was a leading stylist of high society. Because once he arrived in Amsterdam he wanted to be more than just a tailor, he took a private course in pattern drawing and fashion design.
Turkey has a centuries-old tradition as a clothing maker and exporter, dating back to the Ottoman period. This is partly due to its strategic location between Europe and Asia. In addition, the country has high-quality cotton, Aegean cotton, as a raw material.
Turkey is still a major player; The country's clothing and textile industry employs around two million people.
In Turkey, Kiliç says, there is a culture of repairing and wearing second-hand clothes. “My biggest objection to the fashion world is the turnover rate and the ease with which people throw away clothes.” Fast fashion it is called: the consumer culture of buying cheap clothes, wearing them a few times and then throwing them away. Kiliç calls himself a “repairer of the fast economy”.
When he arrived in Amsterdam he had already had a career in textiles in the Canary Islands and Germany. Together with his brothers he started the clothing brand Posus Jeans, intended for skaters and hip-hoppers. He designed the line himself. From one of the racks in his store he takes a pair of jeans with flared legs, strikingly printed with colorful floral patterns and elegant motifs. Very seventies. His fingertips slide over the stitching. “Well made,” he says, “you can't say that about many products made for the volatile market, they are often broken after a week. Then people ask if I want to repair something they bought for 10 euros.” He uses Marktplaats and eBay to look for clothing from Posus Jeans that he has designed himself, to buy them, repair them if necessary and resell them. In the boutique next to his shop.
The eye of the needle
The fact that so many tailors are of Turkish descent also has to do with an entrepreneurial spirit. Figures from the municipal Amsterdam Research, Information and Statistics (IOS) office show that one in four Turkish Amsterdammers is self-employed, compared to one in six people with a Dutch background.
Hasan Özdemir (32) was born in the Netherlands in 1992. He graduated as a business economics teacher. On November 1 last year, he opened a second branch with his father in Ypenburg on the outskirts of The Hague. The store is called the Ypenburgse Tailor. In three months they gained around five hundred new customers and 30 percent more turnover.
Recently a lady asked him to renovate a thirty-year-old Burberry coat that had belonged to her mother. He did. “When you receive a garment for repair,” he says, “the first thing you should always ask is: How was it made? I'm going to study the garment. I always say that a tailor's perfectionism lies in being able to thread thread through the eye of a needle. That requires patience and precision.”
Özdemir senior (63) had the status of “guest worker” in our country for years. As a 27-year-old, he crossed the German border at night, into a Groningen forest. His three brothers took him to Rotterdam-West in a car. He started working in the greenhouses of Westland.
“But his dream was to become a tailor,” says Hasan. “At any moment he and his brothers could be arrested and put on a plane back to Turkey. They lived at different addresses in The Hague and Rotterdam. After they received a residence permit, they started their own clothing factory in Rotterdam in the 1990s. C&A was one of the largest customers.” Hasan still remembers well from his youth the large cold hall on a corner somewhere in Rotterdam, where the sewing machines were constantly rattling.
In 2004 the company went bankrupt. The industry moved to Poland. After a few years, Hasan's father took over an existing clothing repair shop on Dorpsstraat in Nootdorp. There he has now “become a true Nootdorper,” according to his son. Hasan learned the trade from his father by helping him on the weekends, while at the same time studying during the week. After more than ten years of teaching, he started his own business in Ypenburg.
Creating something from nothing
The sons of Mehmet Celil from Libas, in the Amsterdam Pijp, also work in the business. Before he settled here it was an Indian bridal shop. A row of vests with the logo of a student association hangs on a rack. It was an idea of his son, who studied psychology, sociology and criminology at the Vrije Universiteit. He thought that committee and board members would find it special to wear their own jacket or vest from their association. His father started working and it became a great success. His son also built Libas' website.
Celil arrived in the Netherlands in the late eighties, at the age of twenty-six, by train from Germany. Illegal. He had received a note from a friend with an address on it, and he took a taxi at Amsterdam Central Station. It took him to an industrial estate in Noord, it was completely dark, there was no one there. There he stood. Celil: “I had never experienced anything like that before, in Istanbul you heard music day and night, there are always people outside. I had no more than 25 Deutsche Marks with me. The taxi driver only trusted it after he heard Turkish music from an upstairs house, then he let me go inside.”
After five years he received a residence permit. The time before was full of fear. The immigration police could arrest him at any moment. Later his wife also came from Turkey, his children were born here. Celil: “We were poor. My wife made milk from coffee creamer for the little ones.”
For Mehmet Celil, repairing clothes is “an art,” says his son, as he sits hunched behind the sewing machine and adds it every now and then. He is more than just a tailor, he also makes custom clothing. Because the store is located right next to the Albert Cuyp market, customers buy fabrics, buttons and whatever else they need there. Celil turns it into “something beautiful,” as his son says. “Give my father a piece of cloth and he will turn all the individual components into a whole.” Celil adds: “It gives me satisfaction to create something out of nothing, then I am one with the material.”
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