Like her exhaustive client list, Tosh’s work evolves with each project. When a shoot or fashion show is being planned—it could be anything, from a Chanel Métiers d’Art show in Manchester to Daniel Craig’s recent Loewe campaign or Zendaya’s red-carpet event to promote Challengers—Tosh knows she will get a call from the stylist or brand. “They might need a tailor on set, or for fittings with the celebrity or models before a show to ensure that everything fits just right. In an ad campaign or in real life, you can’t use styling tricks like clamps and pins. Most often, the garments are samples that need a final nip and tuck to mould to the body just right. But I am never allowed to cut anything,” she explains. What helps is a studio filled with bolts of fabric, frills and other fashion paraphernalia. “The timelines can be anything from an event coming up in a week’s time to a show or shoot being planned three months later.” For her, no day looks the same. At the time of this interview, Tosh is in the English countryside near Cambridge for a high-profile event she can’t reveal. In the background, I can only see rack of clothes and the wooden pillars of a chalet-style room.
But while she remains tight-lipped about her current project, she’s full of anecdotes from her career. “This one time on a shoot, the stylists arrived with a wardrobe of black, white, and grey clothes, which is what the client thought they wanted. On the day, things took a turn and they decided that they needed a green dress. They sent me out to buy fabric and I had to sellotape a newspaper together to make pattern-cutting paper. I asked the stylist and production team for references of what they wanted and stitched together a dress within six hours from start to finish.”
Her Instagram bio—‘designer, maker and tailor’—makes sense, then. Rarely do all three come together in one non-AI, highly skilled human. But in Tosh’s 39-year-long career, having cut her teeth as a couture seamstress in the ateliers of design greats like McQueen (who taught Tosh “how to look at historical moments in time, take inspiration from designers from years gone past, and embrace technology”) and Karl Lagerfeld (who taught her to not take fashion too seriously), she learned that to be highly valuable, one should be capable of doing everything. “The greatest designers are the ones like John [Galliano] and Lee [McQueen], who could do everything from pattern cutting and draping to constructing a garment,” she says. “If you can do all of those things, your value as a designer will multiply tenfold. Anyone can do a sketch, but the more skills you have, the more valuable you become.”
In the fashion industry of today, where the creative director of a fashion house is the prima donna while the army of tailors and artisans meticulously at work in their ateliers are often overlooked, Tosh is fighting for due credit. With every Instagram post that lists her credit as ‘Tailor: Nafisa Tosh’ alongside other creatives like manicurists and movement directors, she makes space for more skills like hers to be acknowledged and applauded.
Her wish for the future? To open an academy and introduce more young people to tailoring no matter their colour, creed, or class. “Highly skilled garment workers rarely get enough credit. You get Designer of the Year, Model of the Year, Photographer of the Year, Stylist of the Year, yet the huge numbers of people who create the actual fashion go unnoticed. I want young people to know that this is important work and a viable profession, one that gets its rightful due.”
