Alice Zotta

Gave them a cashmere sweater years ago and they did a perfect job in closing a hole.
More recently gave them a fine wool suit jacket with a hole the size of a pencil eraser. They closed the hole with stitches covering the area of a dime and it’s obvious and ugly. It costed $ 110 and I’m pretty sure my cleaners could’ve done the same work for a fraction of the cost.
They did warn me in advance that it won’t be perfect but it wasn’t even close to perfection.

Can’t do better than Zotta for cashmere repairs. My scarf had several holes, and they meticulously fixed them. I can’t see a stitch. It’s a miracle.

Repairs are neither quick nor cheap, however, the workmanship is outstanding. I had a English tweed coat with several tears repaired and you can not discern that there ever were any tears. They leave little white threads that you can pull out so you can find where the repair was done. Again, the repairs are invisible to the eye. I plan on using them again.

So here’s the story. I have two pairs of $ 300-​$ 400 pants that go with my suits. Just bought them in the fall. They both have nickle size holes near the back pockets. I tend to put my phone in my back pocket when I’m working and they must have torn a bit from it. I I went to Alice Zotta after the French-​American rejected to take on the job. The guy that mans the front desk quickly said $ 180 for EACH of the nickle sized holes. So as I turn around, an older lady repairing the clothes quickly remarks. «let me see those». as she probably could see that I was baffled by the price and planning on walking away. She said she could fix them… but couldn’t reweave them… and she wouldn’t know a price to give me… until the patch guy gets back… in two weeks. They asked me if I wanted to leave my pants there. Obviously I didnt want to leave my pants there for 2 weeks, then another x amount of days it takes to repair them. So I left. Strangely enough I had a tailoring appointment at Alterations Master one block up. Went in got my Paul Smith shirt tailored and showed him my pants. He said $ 25 for each pant. Now its still being repaired so I dont know the quality just yet. I will repost here when I have the item. But if I have to say one thing. Alice Zotta needs to pull it together. The pricing and time it takes to do anything is unbelievably poor. The man at the desk was making pricing up. I could image if you have a Hermes Suit that needs a reweave or a sweater that your dead mother gave you. but if you have a normal article of clothing that needs to be fixed, skip this place all together and go to Alterations Master one block up.

Based on great online reviews I thought this was the place to save my really nice Burberry coat which had developed a mysterious hole– perhaps from too much friction from my shoulder bag.
The did fix the hole in my coat (I wouldn’t call it invisible though– far from it!) but it was extremely expensive ($ 200), and took forever (they told me 2 – 3 weeks and it took 5, so the season was over when I finally got it back). Plus they took the fabric to reweave the hole from the fabric self-​belt and neglected to sew the ends closed which I thought was very sloppy. So now I have to shell out another $ 20 at my local drycleaner to get that repaired.
If I knew what the end result would be I would have put all that cash towards a new coat instead.

I was referred to Alice Zotta by a local suit store as being the best weaver in Manhattan. I agree with that. The weave job on my suit required them to cut out a square of fabric and open up the coat seam to sew in the new piece. The weaving was done flawlessly. However, the tailoring on the suit coat was not quite right. After having the jacket for some 5 months, I wasn’t about to take it back to have it fixed. So I will live with it. The price I think is reasonable for the weave, but I don’t think I got the quality I was looking for on the tailoring. Additionally, I left them with about a yard x 6inches of fabric which they assured me I would get back. All I received was a 6×6 inch piece that wasn’t even close to what I gave them.
Overall experience was not great. They are great at what they are known for, weaving. The rest leaves something to be desired.

This place has been featured in a number of prominent publications and the reviews here seemed great, so I said I’d give it a shot with my brand-​new Theory sweater that I stupidly snagged on my jewelry.
I suppose everyone’s perception of «reasonably priced» is subjective, but a price quote of $ 70 to fix a tiny hole seemed quite unreasonable to me. I know this kind of work is labor-​intensive, but I can’t really force myself to spend the better part of what I would use to buy a brand-​new sweater. In addition, Alice was on vacation, and her partner/​employee said it would take at least 1 or 2 months to get my sweater back.
I think I’ll keep looking.

OK, let’s pretend you’re a jaded New Yorker.
You have attitude
You are cheap
You have a really nice piece of clothing that you got at a price and now it has a hole in it.
You go to Alice. This in itself is a timewarp experience, back to the day when people cut office doors in half vertically so they could do business but still have some separation from the customer.
You give Alice your garment. Maybe she will look at it and shake her head and say she can’t fix it. Well, it’s a New York story, right? But let’s pretend she says she can fix it.
She will name a price that will make you think Alice herself is living in a time warp. And yes, it may take a while.
Flash forward.
You go to get your garment. She brings it out. The first thing you notice is that, in the place where your hole used to be, there is a large and very visible thread. She says something about «here is where we did the work.» You say to yourself, «Yeah, she’s pretty good.» Cause you can kind of maybe make out some reweaving work
Then — wait for it – she tugs the thread out and suddenly THERE IS NO WAY TO TELL WHERE THAT DAMNED HOLE WAS.
Folks, you could do worse in this world than to buy yourselves some clothes eating moths, set them to work on a coupla nice woolen items, and take them to Alice, just for the theater.
The woman is magical. She is probably about 110 years old by now, too, so don’t wait. Go See Alice. (A loyal customer since the early 1980’s)

Do you believe in magic? I do, after Alice Zotta fixed the rip in my Dolce&Gabbana virgin wool/​cashmere suit. Sure it takes time, especially because she is where the designers go to fix their runway mishaps, ie cigarette burns, rips & tears, etc. She is truly an artist practicing a lost skill, therefore even though the suit was away for some time.
5 stars for flawless, baby.

Somehow I’d managed to tear the V in one of my favorite V-​neck sweaters (a black cashmere Costume National number — and I namedrop only to make a point of the quality of Ms. Zotta’s work and justify shelling out $ 20 for a repair when yes, I know, I could get cashmere for cheap at Uniqlo). It was only a small tear, but the location made it immediately obvious. So what does one do in this type of situation? I suppose I could’ve taken it to a dry cleaner, which often offer minor alteration and repair services, but I was afraid they’d just do a simple darning job and worried that the repair threads might be visible.
So instead, I took my sweater up to a dusty little shoebox room on the 17^th floor of a random midtown hi-​rise and handed it through a window to an elderly old Italian woman to get it rewoven. Apparently she usually accomplishes this by taking threads from another part of the garment and weaving them back into the problem area. And, two weeks later, I got my sweater back, good as new. The repair was completely seamless and totally invisible. The only reason that I don’t give her the full five stars is because she’s in such demand that her turnaround time suffers, but it’s a small price to pay if it means you don’t have to retire your favorite sweater.