Brides BEWARE!!! The Village Tailor on 125 Sullivan Street in SoHo RUINED my wedding dress. The "master tailor," Kawser, is awful, the farthest thing from a "master" that a tailor could be, and owner Vincent Rao is a bully. In addition, they're really expensive**: I've found that their prices are much higher than other places in Manhattan that do a better job. Here's my tale of woe: I brought my brand-new Nicole Miller wedding gown to the Village Tailor for alterations ("We send all our brides there!" the SoHo store assured me -- I now know the Village Tailor makes a killing off of Nicole Miller referrals. Don't listen to them!). Kawser spent all of five minutes with me, even though I tried to ask questions and make suggestions - this was my wedding dress, after all, and I wanted to make sure we were on the same page. He seemed distracted and wasn't really listening. The shop is small, cramped, and stale-smelling, and I was barely able to turn around in the dressing room. But despite this, they quoted me $225 to take a tiny bit off the hem of the dress and bring up the spaghetti straps, and like a sucker, I agreed. Huge mistake! They COMPLETELY DESTROYED my wedding dress: it was supposed to be floor-length with a longer train, but Kawser made it so short that it barely reached my ankles. He also cut off the entire train (!), leaving only a tiny scrap of material that looked like a little mullet. The hem, which was now dangling way above the floor, was wildly uneven, the floor-length underslip was shortened to my SHINS and the straps up top were too tight. This was not at all what we had discussed - no person in their right mind would ever pay money to have their wedding dress hacked and chopped in this way. It's a very simple design, but this tailor showed a complete ignorance of how to deal with it. When I tried the altered dress on in the Village Tailor, one of the other customers **gasped audibly** and a waiting bride looked at me in my ruined dress, then looked like she was about to cry. When I complained to the Village Tailor, Mr. Rao tried to argue that the dress was "defective," and that they hadn't done anything wrong. After a lot of back-and-forth, they eventually admitted that big mistakes had been made, and "to calm me down," they refunded me the $225 I had paid for alterations. Because I refused to wear a hideous, way-too-short, crappy-looking mullet-dress on my wedding day, I still had to shell out the money for A BRAND-NEW WEDDING DRESS! Believe me, I got that one altered at a seamstress uptown (Ellen Canali of Ellen's Couture - loved her!) who charged far less for four visits, and did an absolutely beautiful job. I would never recommend the Village Tailor to anyone -- please don't let these people take their scissors to anything you own, especially not your wedding gown!
**the second time I was in the shop, I overheard a woman arguing with Mr. Rao for charging her over $250 for alterations to a simple black cotton bridesmaid's dress. She asked them why they hadn't told her how much the alterations would cost before they did them, and that she never would have agreed to let them alter the dress had she known what they planned to do, and how much it would cost.