Al's Attire
Categories: Fashion, Sewing & Alterations [Edit]
Neighborhood: North Beach/Telegraph Hill1314 Grant Ave
(between Green St & Vallejo St)
San Francisco, CA 94133 (415) 693-9900
- Hours:
Mon-Thu 11:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.
Fri-Sat 11:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.
Sun 12:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m. - Price Range: $$$
- Accepts Credit Cards: Yes
- Parking: Street
- Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
20 reviews
Neighborhood: SOMA
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27 Reviews for Al's Attire
Al's is great for my butch girlfriend. Finding a ready made men's suit for her for our wedding was becoming the bain of my existence until Al's Ahhhh.... now I don't have to worry at all.
I'm from Berkeley, and heard from a friend that this was the place to go to get a custom coat. I had an old favorite that I wore until it was tattered. Al's made an exact copy, and then I ordered an addition custom tailored model with different style pockets and lining. The girls at Al's took my measurements, helped me pick out what I needed and made suggestions about special details.
Pricilla called to tell me the coats were ready, but I had a hard time scheduling a return to the city. She popped my order in the mail. How convenient is that?? Great customer service, lovely stylish clothing. I love the special tags that are sewn inside.
I've been shopping at Al's Attire for years and am in awe of his handmade pieces. There is no better place to look and feel vintage, as all the items are made from scratch with new fabric.
Al's Attire s not a chain, but it is a *find* as he sells to Japan and to loyal fans in the film and music industry. The owner, Al Ribaya is a tailor (started off designing shoes with a business called: Taming of the Shoe so you know he has a sense of humor) with amazing style and has been in the fashion business for decades. The shop is in the heart of North Beach on Grant and Vallejo. I love to swing by Al's and Oola and have coffee at Cafe Trieste and make an afternoon of it.
Al is truly a great guy and a genius with a great eye for detail and making women and men look their absolute best. He makes custom pieces that will fit you perfectly. Al also sells 'off-the-rack' and I have bought a few coats and dresses which fit, feel and look great.
When I want attention, I wear this peach coat with fantastic oversized buttons. I get stopped EVERY time asking where I found such a treasure, so i keep his business cards in the right hand pocket. His pieces are worth it, as they are quality, hand made and will never go out of style. Gotta love the NON-chain clothiers and boutiques!
I have purchased 3 Marilyn Monroe style halter dresses in very different fabrics :
*one is a sundress perfect for tropical weather and the heat wave we had in June,
*one is red crepe and very Hollywood 40's femme fatale.
*one has embroidered cherries on it which is whimsical and very pin-up.
I've also bought custom shirts for my bf and you can choose the fabric, interesting buttons and even the color of the thread for the button holes. Invest in one custom instead of 4 throw-away pieces from H&M.
Al has designed glamorous dresses and wedding gowns, and also does alterations. Take that old suit and spruce it up with some vintage buttons for a song. I did that, and gave 2 old suits a new life.
Ting and Pricilla are amongst the talented staff, and they too have great taste. Al and Priscilla are designing a custom gown for me to wear to a wedding in New York. Yum. Can't wait for the paparazzi!
Honestly, I SWAP more than I SHOP. But each piece I've invested in from Al's Attire was worth it. If I won the lottery, I would run to and go on a shopping spree. Need I say more?
i am trying really hard to avoid coming back here. i was rather charmed with the space at first, but attitude and price to quality ratio can really bring a person down.
unfortunately, there are not so many options for non-hemming alterations and i tend to get a bit nervous.
I found Al's thanks to Yelp. I needed something special for a fancy party and just couldn't seem to find it in the stores. Al was amazing! He worked with me to put all of the pieces together that I wanted into one gorgeous silk jacket. He really knows his stuff, and is really easy and great to work with. He only had 6 weeks to turn my dreams into reality and, even with a muslin and a follow up fitting, finished with a week to spare.
Pricey but worth it for a truly custom and perfect fitting jacket.
He also said he can duplicate my favorite pair of pants so I will never be without :) I will probably take him up on it.
Thanks Al!
I love this place. I needed a coat for a trip back east and was not optimistic about finding something off-season. But Al's Attire came to the rescue. The gal at Ooma pointed me in the right direction and I cannot thank her more.
I have the most beautiful coat EVER. I had to stop from getting two coats. At about $400 a pop, that can get pricey so I held back but I will go back and get that second coat...someday...soon.
You get so used all that horribly made clothing that when you see well-made garments one can get mystified. Al's has left me starry-eyed. Just touching the clothes made me happy. The detail and quality of each garment is...excellent.
Being a petite girl, coats that fit are hard to find. I need look no more because I have found coat utopia. Cool vintage designs and fabric. Can a girl ask for anything more - yeah, that it fits perfectly because they do the alterations to make it your coat.
I was worried that maybe they would be a bit stuffy here, but everyone was down-to-earth, extremely helpful and oh so friendly. Need a coat - go to Al's, it will last forever, be unique and oh course, be absolutely gorgeous.
I walked into Al's today on a whim. Well, a partial whim. The four coats in the window caught my eye with their attention to detail, georgeously unusual fabric and perfectly matched plaids.
I'm a seamstress, so once inside, I went over the coats with a fine toothed comb. Vintage fabrics, hand-finished seams, beautiful linings, unusual yet totally wearable designs....each garment is a work of art, and reasonably priced considering what you're getting. And the custom-made garments are only $60 extra, which is very much of a bargain.
I will be saving my pennies to afford an Al's coat one day. It's great to see handmade one-of-a-kind garments coming back into style in a gap-clone world. Sew on, Al!
I just got back from Al's Attire. My husband gave me a gift certificate for a custom coat (best x-mas present ever!). I spent hours trying on different jackets and coats, choosing fabric and buttons, looking at lining fabric and getting measured. It was a really fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I cannot wait until my new jacket is complete at the end of February. I'm already saving up for a custom made dress. Don't be intimidated; this is a wonderful way to buy clothing. I will have a hard time going back to regular stores after this experience.
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Al made my wedding suit a few years ago and it was fantastic. i looked like a million bucks. and he's a great conversationalist.
Al made me a a beautiful wool white 1930's style suit for my wedding. I looked awesome. You can go the fullcustom route for sure. But don't overlook the possibilities of repurposing clothes you love that don't work anymore.
I just brought in two suits for him to rip apart and rebuild after I lost weight and gained the ability to identify correctly fitting suits, something i lacked when I spent $1600 ten years ago on the suits. So they are a little dated and a lot too big, but still nice with years of wear to go. What to do?
Bring it into Al's! They are moving the shoulders, taking in the chest and the waist, removing the pleats and shifting the buttons. That's a lot of customization and it is less expensive than buying a full custom suit.
And don't worry if Al isn't there; the "girls" do fine and are to be trusted.
Way to Go Al! I got a hooked up suit for my wedding and Al made a lifetime customer. Al will take you step by step through the process of designing your suit. Want a certain button, covered buttons, saccented button holes, Al's your man. My suit was fricking amazing, especially cus I picked every fabric. I have never worn anything that fit so amazing either. Standard store bought suits for the same price, why? You can find me at Al's dreaming up hooded army coats and pleated bomer jackets.
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New update: 2/19/08
I have to lower this one more star and here's why. So to add onto the story below. The two-week rush order never happened. It took them three weeks. The hats also were ready last Thursday and they never called me to tell me that they were ready. I actually called them today to check on the status of the hats and found out my hats were ready. OK, so the hats were rushed and they were rushed for a reason. So when did they think it was ok for the hats to sit there a week late and not call me to let me know they were ready or at least let me know they have arrived? I paid $140 a hat. Yes, they are beautifully made custom hats but they're still $140 a hat. And, the hats aren't even ready because the patches with our names on them aren't even on the hats. Lets hope the hats are the right fabric and the right style this time. I'm going to have to raise a little hell when I go in to pick them up tomorrow. Al, you're great and your good to your customers but what's up??
I had this place at 5 stars but I had to remove one star for their most recent botch on my order of two Gatsby hats (one for me and one for my dad). After waiting a month for the hats to be made they not only used the wrong fabric and color they did the wrong style and they only had one hat ready. They didn't even call me to ask me if the color change was ok. I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't wait a month for the hats but thankfully Al is so great with his customers he is going to rush the order so I get it in two weeks as opposed to four weeks. They also let me pick out the fabric from their new order they got from Italy.
So I have a rather large head....and I don' t mean like I wear a 7 1/2 ball cap...i wear an 8....I think that's the largest size hat they make. But anyways I was walking by Al's one day and noticed they had some nice looking Gatsby-style hats (like a newsie hat but slightly different). I almost wasn't going to go in since I figured they wouldn't have a hat that would fit my head but I went in anyways. I told Al about my dilemma of having an abnormally large cranium and he said they would have a hat that would fit my head since they do custom tailoring. Luckily, there was a hat already made that was a 7 7/8 which fit and looked good. Al stretched it out a little more in his stretching machine and it fit to my head perfectly. Obviously with a custom tailoring shop you have to pay custom prices but it's worth it. Plus Al is very attentive and takes care of his customers. Thanks Al.
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This is an amazing place! You just do not find clothes like this ... The craftsmanship is amazing!!!! I have only one beef... Al wasn't there, two girls were running things, and they didn't give us the time of day. One drank her coffee rudely, and it was a pitty really, because we had questions. The dog was so cute though. a little black puglet, that had a bed made out of a hat box~ very clever! This place may well be worth a second try when the owner is there, or maybe I will bring a dog biscuit and try to get on the girls good side next time???
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I'm glad that everyone else has had wonderful experiences with Al's, I wish I could say I was one of them.This is the worst experience I've had in all my dealings while planning my wedding.
My boyfriend and I (not a fan of the word fiance) went in to have a vest custom made. They were so nice and helpful. We picked out a wonderful pattern for the back/lining, which was important to us as we intended for it to show for most of the wedding. He's not a jacket kind of guy, we're getting married outside where it's hot, etc.
After about a month, my boyfriend checked in to see how it was going, after no word from them. They told him to come in for his fitting. Well, the vest fit perfectly, but it wasn't even close to the fabric we'd picked out. They said they'd made an "executive" decision when they ran out of the one we'd ordered. Excuse me, but I think that when you are paying to have something custom made, you get to make the executive decisions. They didn't even call to tell him they'd run out, or ask if they could use another fabric.
So we went back to pick another fabric and have them remake it, even though we are very busy and this is a waste of our time. At this point Deirdre was very nice and apologetic. She admitted "This is so annoying." So we felt OK about it. I let her know that we needed it quickly, we had other things to pick out dependent on the vest. She promised us a week, a week and a half at the most. After two weeks my boyfriend had to contact them b/c they had not contacted us. Guess what. They did it again. They made another executive decision and made another vest that we did not order. "Hope that's O.K." they said in the email, again without ever contacting us. No it is definitely NOT O.K. We are getting ever closer to our wedding, and still no closer to completing his outfit. And now we are just about out of time to go someplace else. Not only is it completely unprofessional of them in the first place (and the second place), we really just don't need any stress added to our plannnig and they are wasting our precious time. And I'm worried that we don't have the time to complete his outfit.
UPDATE: I originally gave them 1 star b/c of the above. But they ended up handling the situation well and, though we didn't get the vest we wanted, they didn't charge us what we originally agreed upon. And they did seem truly sorry. Their customer service in the face of their screw up earns them two extra stars, even though we are disappointed about the actual clothing item. The way you treat you treat customers says a lot about a business. Al's does treat people well.
Love this place!! After having a custom dress made here, we've now also gotten a custom made suit and two beautifully hand tailored jackets.
This custom-made coat shop is the kind that dreams are made of. We popped in one night while waiting for friends to arrive for dinner at The House and were thrilled by the craftsmanship; ever since I have lusted for a perfectly tailored coat from Al's.
A wide variety of styles is available and they'll also recreate or retool to your specifications.
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I love Al's! I first found him late one night, while we were walking through North Beach, stitching away at a skirt. I tried said skirt on in my size and was sold. I'd never felt how good something made so well could feel. The next Christmas my husband got me a gift certificate to have a custom coat made and after pouring over fabric swatches for a good hour I decided on a reversable bomber that I still love to this day. A few more custom blazers have made their way into my closet, and I can't wait to go again.
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Last year I got a custom fall coat from Al. He did a fabulous job. My husband was so impressed he even got his own coat. Now I need to save up from a spring coat.
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Al is amazing! Once you get one custom piece you will definitely be back for more. I found him when I first moved to the city and was in need of a coat. Now I have 2 coats and a skirt that are totally one of a kind and unique thanks to him. I can't describe how fun it is to have Al do custom work for you, you have to experience it for yourself! You won't be sorry!
I have been a loyal Al's customer for 5 years now, and have never been dissapointed. I have bought both off-the-rack clothing, as well as custom shirts, pants, and recently, a tuxedo. Al is the best...he really knows how to take care of his customers.
Al lets you be as involved in the process as you want to be. Everything can be custom selected, from thread color, buttons, pocket type, collar spread, etc.. His men's clothes are great, but everytime I visit, I am equally, if not more, impressed with his women's line.
I no longer live in SF, but every time I come to visit the Bay Area, I make a point of visting the store, whether to shop or just say hi. In fact I am heading over this afternoon. Check him out...you wont be disappointed.
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I have to be honest the idea of getting something "custom made" was rather intimidating. I pass Al's on my walk home from work and finally got to courage to step in. Would it be too expensive? Do I have any idea what I want? Well my fears and hesitations were quickly put to rest. I ended up with the cutest shirtdress. I found one on the rack that I loved, so I ended up getting the off-the-rack price but the dress was still completely remodeled to fit me! Honestly, it was the same price as a dress I would have bought in a store, but unlike any store-bought dress, it's an original and fits perfectly. I met Al, who is charming and takes such pride in his work. His styles are a touch vintage and an example of excellent craftsmanship and attention to detail.
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I love Al!
He is a genius.
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I needed an alteration to a stretch jersey dress...basically needed myself sewn into the dress and was nervous how it was going to turn out. They did a fantastic job, took pictures of the dress pinned before sewing to assure the correct outcome and turned the job around in 24 hours for only $20. And they returned my dress in a real garment bag and a wooden hanger...and they were very nice. I would trust them with anything and I am very weary of tailors.
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This man can do anything. And it all looks fabulous. I bought a handmade dress there which was (thank goodness) from last season so it was half off. I'm going to start saving now so I can get a coat by winter... This place is not for the student's budget, but it's definitely worth scrimping for... I LOVE these clothes.
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So I'm looking for a really cute and original coat for the holidays, but I can't really find anything I like. So I pop into a little neighborhood shop on Grant Ave in North Beach that has always caught my eye. What I find is an amzing variety of beautiful coats and skirts (and shirts for the guys) with the best cuts you can imagine. They just compliment your figure so well, unlike many coats that cover up your figure. And he has all these wonderful vintage fabrics so you can create your very own coat that will be a true original. They are a little expensive ($350-$450 for custom coats) but they are very well made and totally unique. So does Yelp have a holiday wishlist???
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I scoured Yelp for a dressmaker... and Yelp sent me Al. I first met with Priscilla who was sweet and super cool. She started me off on my consultation and design, took pictures, did some sketches and had a muslin made. Later in my journey I met Al, a very cool and stylish chap, while fitting my muslin. On first impressions I got the sense that he knew was he was doing, a tiny bit diva, but well appreciated and expected with talented folks. He made an executive decision to nix the muslin as it was not ideal to work with as far as fitting. He sent me away to find fabric and "foundation" (aka. bra) for my dress explaining that without these a fitting was useless. Now with my fabric, foundation and visual image of my dress I will return to Al and let the magic begin. Check out the store. They have amazing coats there made with amazing craftsmanship and attention to detail. When I saw the coats they made I was certain they could make me a wedding dress. To be continued...
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Al = secret fashion weapon. You can have fabulous clothing custom-made for so much less than you think. No really, you can! He really makes you part of the design process -- the fittings are so fun because you can watch the piece coming together. My winter coat was loosely based on a picture I tore out of Elle, but then customized and made 100 times better -- I got to pick out the buttons, trim, lining, etc. And look -- there it is on his website: http://homepage.mac.co... -- it's the "Laurel"! Don't believe the website pictures, though -- the fabrics are so much more luscious in person. A lot of them are vintage, as are the buttons. If you're good, Al will let you go upstairs and play with the bolts of fabric. In addition to the coats, he made me a gorgeous bias-cut '30s-style gown for a vintage-themed wedding. And maybe the best part? The adorable stitched label inside that says "Exclusively for Laurel."
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