A couple of years ago I happened to pass by Fairfield Clothiers and Tailors and its reputation for bespoke clothing. It occurred to me how rare a sight tailor shops are these days.

My investigative reporter’s instincts soon got the better of me. I wondered how business was in a time when men were dressing increasingly casual in the marketplace.

The owner, Naresh Mansukhani, said. “We recommend that style and quality conscious men buy two custom-made suits rather than five off the peg.”

Visitors to the store’s Web site at www.suityourself can also order clothing and have selected items personally tailored to individual measurements by professional tailors at Fairfield Clothiers before having it shipped.

The conversation with Naresh eventually led to a magazine article about casual dress in the marketplace that is believed by many in the men’s wear business to be currently in the process of reversing itself. It also led me to think about the art of cutting and sewing cloth – tailoring.

The craft evolved slowly in Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first reference to the word “tailor” gives the specific date of 1297. And as we all know – the dictionary is never wrong. Certainly by that time tailoring guilds, as well as those of weavers and cloth merchants were well established.

During the repressive Dark Ages clothing had been regarded as a means of concealing the body. But with the flowering of the Renaissance came the accentuation of the human form.

The primitive loose, sack-like robe gave way to multiple pieces of fabric which gave shape to the human form. This was the beginning of tailoring, and by extension, fashion.

This reconstruction of the human body in fabric required skilled labor. Soon the artisan who made the pattern (cutter) and the one who did the sewing (tailor) became interdependent.

Because of the Renaissance, first Italy, then Spain and France became centers of fashion with the power, wealth and influence of their empires.

By the middle of the 17th century men abandoned the doublet, hose and cloak which had been de rigueur items since the 1500s and began to wear coats, vests and breeches and the origins of modern dress.

By mid-19th century England all the ostentatious remnants of the French court were gone and fashions worn by aristocrats and the rising middle class were virtually indistinguishable. London tailors predominated with tailoring that blended the styles of the landed gentry, sporting attire and bourgeois businesswear in the age of the Industrial Revolution.

Tailoring was engaged in a shift from an emphasis on decoration, fabric and color to one concerned foremostly with fit. Tailors could not only mimic the body, but also could improve and idealize it. The term gentleman, a 19th century term, frowned upon excess in favor of discretion, simplicity and perfection of cut.

London remained the center of men’s fashion until the 1960s when the Italians introduced La Dolce Vita and a variation of new styles and fabrics.

Fashion and tailoring have witnessed huge innovations in the last 100 years. Sewing machines do the work that used to be done by hand. New fabric technology has created wools as light as butter that can be worn year-round. And fashions have adapted to leisurely, climate-controlled lifestyles.

Ever since the invention of ready-made clothing, people have whispered about the demise of tailoring as a profession. But in a mass-produced, throwaway society such as ours, the craft of tailoring stands out like a jewel in the mud.

William Faulkner names one of his unforgettable southern families Satoris after the muscle, the longest in man, which obliquely crosses the front of the thigh. It assists in rotating the leg when we sit cross-legged, or like a tailor, and is the root of our word sartorial.

If I can borrow and paraphrase from Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the nature of man – the art of tailoring “will not merely endure: it will prevail.”

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