Remembering Adam Tailor, Who Helped 'Stitch the City Together'

When I learned of Adam Tailor's recent death, I told his story, as I knew it, to anyone who would listen. And unsurprisingly, each person I spoke with had their own Adam Tailor story. 

A Queen Anne friend spun a long and perilous tale of an heirloom wedding dress that barely reached his shop in time for the wedding. A longtime downtown resident shared how she loved to watch him "elegantly standing in front of his shop, smoking, smiling, chatting." 

And as I told his story over a beer to a stranger in north Seattle, I could feel her impatience for me to finish so she could toss her own Adam Tailor tale into the fray.

"I've met so many random people," she said, "whose only connection to me is that they also went to Adam Tailor. So many of us used him. It's as if he spent his life stitching the city together." 

Adam Tailor's legal name was Bệ (pronounced "Bay") Vӑn Nguyễn, but most everyone knew him by the name that he painted on his Pioneer Square shopfront glass when he first opened for business in 1984: "ADAM Tailor." He was still new to Seattle when he opened his shop, having recently arrived from a Philippines refugee camp that took him in following his escape from the communist regime of his native Vietnam. Morning, noon, and well into the night, often seven days a week despite the painted words on his window that claimed "Closed Sundays," Bệ Vӑn Nguyễn was the tailor of Pioneer Square known as Adam Tailor.

For the past several years, I've been photographing Seattle's downtown streets and for a spell had a studio a few blocks from his shop. I took my first photo of Bệ in May 2019, and dozens more over the years until the cancer that would eventually take his life forced him to close his shop in 2024. 

Photographically speaking, his shop was a terrible subject. It had poor lighting, and it was set along a dark, gritty stretch of South Jackson Street with the signage of the neighboring tattoo parlor offering the only color to grace its presence. 

But with Bệ at work, framed behind the shop's glass front, the place felt sacred. Watching him bent over his sewing machine in full concentration is what drew me back repeatedly. Whenever I watched him at work, I saw an artisan locked in, in the flow, as artists like to say, oblivious to the world around him, at one with his craft. It was beautiful to witness.

For 40 years he built a business in that tiny, glassed-in shop with little more than a needle, a pair of scissors, thread, and a sewing machine. With those simple tools, he earned enough to pay for his wife and daughters to join him from the Thai refugee camp in which they had landed following their escape from Vietnam, and eventually enough for his wife to start her own Adam Tailor shop, first in the Central District, and then in Columbia City, where today three generations of Nguyen women continue to tailor.

Computer? Credit card reader? Social media? Advertising? Apps?

Bệ had none of that. He grew his business with his two bare hands, stitch by stitch, customer by customer. And in return, his customers spread the word.  

It's easy to wax poetic and nostalgic about a fading craft like tailoring. Most of us buy clothes that we'll eventually toss or donate. Most of us don't think twice about why so few tailor shops exist in our communities until we need one, and we suddenly find them hard to find and, thanks to the irrepressible equation of demand and supply, expensive. 

For many, Bệ's life in front of a sewing machine may seem little more than a quaint story about days gone by. Missing Bệ — feeling the void that his death has left in the community — isn't about nostalgia. It's about losing a man who did indeed stitch our city together. And it's about the pang that we experience when the thread that he used to connect us to one another suddenly frays.

Adam Taylor — Bệ Vӑn Nguyễn — Rest in Peace.

Prayers and visitation for Bệ Vӑn Nguyễn will be held Saturday, Sept. 26, at St. George Catholic Church, 5306 13th Ave. S. at 8:30 a.m. A funeral mass will follow at 11:30 a.m. The public is invited.