Friday December 16, 2005 The Guardian
Bespoke tailor to tyrants, sartorial stylist to some of the most ruthless men in the Middle East, Recep Cesur is intimate with the vital statistics of Saddam Hussein. Sitting in his tailor's shop in the heart of Istanbul's rag trade, the Kurdish cutter whips out a white plastic folder enclosing a dozen sheets of A4 paper. He takes out the first page. It reads: Saddam Hussein, President - Trousers 54, Jacket 56, Outside leg 112cm, Height 1.86m, Shirt XL, Shoe 45.
"I know all this by heart. I don't even need to look at the measurements," says Cesur, grinning.
He has been cutting cloth for Saddam for almost a decade, supplying the former dictator with the dark, conservative, made-to-measure suits, white shirts, and shoes that he favours. The suit - of high-quality pure Turkish wool, a white pinstripe on intense navy that the tailor designed and reserves exclusively for Saddam - has become Cesur's ticket to stardom in the Arab world. He also supplies him with white silk handkerchiefs and crisp, white cotton shirts.
Cesur, with an expert eye for the well-dressed gent, is impressed by Saddam's style. "George Bush dresses very fashionably," he says. "Our prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also dresses very well. But Saddam's height is very beautiful, so he wears a suit very well, very elegant. And he's very fussy about what he wears, like a model."
Things may be going poorly for Saddam, on trial for genocide in Baghdad, but, ironically, the ex-despot's misfortune has been the making of the tailor. On television channels across the Middle East, the Cesur brand gets free advertising worth millions every time Saddam is shown, attired in a dark Cesur number, at his trial. The result is that the Cesur factory and shop in the heart of the Istanbul rag trade - five brothers work in the business, headed by Recep, but "Allah is the boss" - can't ship out the suits fast enough.
"Since the trial started, our sales in Iraq have tripled," says Cesur. "We reckon we've now got around 80% of the suit market in Baghdad. Before the war, it was 40%."
Arab males are apparently taking the view that if it is good enough for Saddam, then it is good enough for them. The Cesur brand has become a status symbol, signalling coolness and a little bit of defiance. The buyers commonly prefer to show off by leaving the Cesur label on the cuff. Across the Middle East generally, the business is now selling up to 5,000 suits a month, 10 times the level of five years ago.
Cesur's intimate acquaintance with Saddam's sartorial foibles started almost a decade ago when the tailor went to Baghdad and spied a gaping hole in the market. There were no gentlemen's outfitters in the city, he says, and you had to go to several stores to get kitted out. So he opened a shop selling everything from shoes to belts to made-to-measure suits. Business boomed. He now has nine shops in Iraq, including two in the Iraqi capital, as well as a warehouse in Birmingham, a shop in Paris, and three in Kenya.
One day in 1996, a Saddam crony came to the Baghdad shop and took away three suits - jacket size 56, trousers 58 (in prison, Saddam has lost weight, he is now a 54 trouser). One suit was returned for alteration and then they got a bigger order for several more suits.
"That's when we knew it was for Saddam. He sent his nephew. Saddam, of course, did not come to the shop."
Contrary to media reports about Cesur personally getting the measure of Saddam, the tailor himself has never met him. His shop manager in Baghdad, Dilsad Haci, however, did meet him a couple of times and measured him.
Over the years, about 200 suits - at $500 (£280) each - went to the presidential palace, about 80 of them for Saddam himself. His henchmen and loyalists, such as the former foreign minister Tariq Aziz, were also regular customers. "They never queried the price. They never tried to bargain. Very good customers," says Cesur. Saddam was a fairly demanding client. There would be requests for suits with single or double vents,single- or double-breasted, one or two back pockets on the trousers. "The shoes were always black."
"They would ask for one or two different styles. We'd add a third. They never sent them back," says Cesur. "But for the trial we wanted him to change his suits, to wear a different one every day. So we sent him a beige suit. We've never seen him wearing it. Probably they don't let him."
The Cesur story is a cliché of rags to riches. A poor, uneducated Kurd from Diyarbakir in south-east Turkey, he moved to Istanbul as a teenager in search of work, waiting tables, cleaning toilets, before getting a menial job in a tailor's and eventually taking over the shop and founding the family business. The dapper 37-year-old now offers a range of suits starting at around £50, up to Saddam-class at more than £300.
As a Kurd, of course, Cesur might be expected to have profound reservations about dressing and beautifying the man responsible for the mass murder in the 1980s of tens of thousands of his fellow Kurds in Iraq. He's having none of it. "Politics and business don't mix and we want to keep it that way. We prefer business," he says soberly. "Saddam never saw us as a Kurdish business, just as a Turkish firm. As for me, I don't care if he is a president or a prisoner. Most of all, for me, he has been a very good customer."
One Cesur item you don't see Saddam sporting at court is the dark tie that was an earlier fixture. Instead, he appears in a white cotton shirt buttoned up to the neck. The explanation is obvious. "You're not allowed ties in jail," says Cesur with a smile. But the Cesur shirt is a bit of a problem for the fastidious Kurd. "We saw him on television at the trial. It was nice he was wearing my suit. But the shirt was unpressed. It really should be ironed".