Norwood Alterations Is Bringing Your Favourite Clothes Back to Life

As consumers become increasingly concerned with sustainability, many people are exploring new technologies that can help reduce their footprint. But one of the best ways to cut back on waste is to look in the other direction and go back to the artisans using traditional methods to create and look after high quality goods.

Having spent a quarter of a century wielding a needle and thread, Ahmad Zia Pana definitely falls into that category and since opening Norwood Alterations last October he has found a steady stream of customers making their way to his door.

“The work I do now is a little different from when I first learned,” he says, “because when I was in Afghanistan we used to make garments from scratch. Everything was completely tailor-made then, but now it’s mainly smaller alterations.”

It means that he works on almost every type of clothing imaginable, from wedding outfits to favourite suits that no longer fit as comfortably as they once did and school uniforms that still have a few years left in them. Some customers have taken advantage of fashion's circularity by delving into the back of their wardrobes to find classics that are once again in vogue. But they all have one thing in common: they’ve discovered that altering garments you already own is the easiest way to reduce the financial and environmental cost of your wardrobe.

Paradoxically, altering existing garments requires a higher degree of skill than making them from scratch as Pana has to work with each outfit’s unique dimensions and fabrics.“You need to find a solution for each problem, and it requires some time to master these skills, but there are a lot of tricks we can use that customers don’t even know about,” he explains. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I can alter anything to make it fit well again. I’ve had so many customers bring me one suit, then when that fits properly again they’re so happy that they bring me ten more.”

Pana’s many years of experience allow him to work quickly – he provides a same day service for pants hemming, and larger jobs are done within a week – while he also offers dry cleaning and mends everything from small holes to large rips. “If you have a brand new garment that cost you $500 but it has some moth holes, you can’t wear it any more so it’s useless, but we can provide invisible mending to make it look good again.”

And it’s not just used items that Pana works his magic on. “Sometimes it’s really hard to find the right size clothes and a lot of people fall in between sizes,” he says. “So the easiest thing for them is to buy something from the store and then bring it here to get it altered. It means that everybody can afford to have a tailor-made wardrobe.”

You can find Pana at Shop 19/177-193 (Parade Central) The Parade, Norwood.