HOLLYWOOD — On the rack by the window of Solano & Sons this week hung a black tuxedo bound for an awards ceremony and a turquoise gown bound for a fifteenth-birthday party, and Ernesto Solano intends to have both perfect by Saturday.
Solano, 61, runs the tailor shop his grandfather opened off Western Avenue in 1954 and his father ran after that. The name promises sons, and the shop has them: Ernesto’s daughter, Camila, 29, took over the fine beadwork two years ago, making the “Sons” a fiction the family finds too much trouble to repaint. Between them they handle a clientele that swings, sometimes in the same afternoon, from studio stylists renting formalwear for a client to families outfitting a quinceañera down to the last hem.
“A tuxedo for a red carpet and a gown for a fifteen-year-old are the same job. Same pins, same deadline, same person who cries if it’s wrong,” Solano said, chalking a trouser cuff without looking up. “The stylist tips better. The family remembers longer. I do both the same. If you rush the quinceañera to make time for the movie star, you don’t understand the business you’re in.”
Award season is the shop’s loud money, a stretch of weeks when stylists arrive with garments and impossible timelines and pay premiums for overnight work. Solano treats it as a seasonal surge rather than the heart of the business, which he says is the steadier stream of weddings, funerals, first communions and quinceañeras that fill the calendar the other eleven months. The gowns are Camila’s specialty now — the beading, the boning, the structural work that turns a dress into something a girl can dance in without fear.
“Award season, the garment goes on television for four seconds and comes back to the rental house,” Camila said, threading a needle finer than the ones her father favors. “A quinceañera dress is in the photos on the wall for fifty years. Tell me which one deserves the careful hands.”
The trade is harder to sustain than the full rack suggests. Solano said the number of working tailors on this side of the Boulevard has fallen steadily, thinned by cheap alterations chains and by the plain fact that fewer young people want to learn a craft measured in decades. He trained Camila himself, over her mother’s objections that there was no money in it, and concedes her mother was not entirely wrong about the money.
What keeps the shop open, he said, is the repeat trade — the families who brought a wedding suit in 1994 and bring a grandson’s communion blazer now, trusting a name over a chain. On Saturday morning the tuxedo and the gown will both leave the shop finished, and Solano will not tell you which one he pinned first. He will tell you both were done right, which is, he says, the only thing the sign has ever promised.