GABRIELE AMLUNG is a two-table studio in Neu-Ulm: a cutting table for skirts and a wall of forms for jackets. The shop carries eight pieces, four of each, and they were chosen as one wardrobe rather than as eight separate products. There is a brown plaid mini and a pleated one with pockets, a white floral embroidered mini and a wine plaid midi, then a brown zip-and-button jacket, a coffee single breasted cut, a khaki straight cut and a red button front. The number is deliberately small. Everything on the table has to work with at least three of the other seven, and anything that did not was cut from the list before the photography began.
Pattern work comes before anything else. A plaid is laid out, marked and cut, then laid out again because the cloth moves once it leaves the roll, and the second layout decides whether the side seam lines up at the hip. The floral embroidery is centred by eye and then verified with a rule, since a motif sliced at the hem is the first flaw a customer sees. Jackets are closed on a form and then on a body, because only a body shows whether the front edges meet at the waist. Buttons are stressed by hand and replaced when they resist, and every zip is left closed overnight so the tape settles into the seam.
Packing happens at the same table, in paper rather than plastic. A skirt is folded once along the side seam, a jacket is closed with tissue rolled at the collar, and the card inside carries the numbers that answer most questions: waist, rise, finished length, shoulder, sleeve drop. If a measurement is missing it is taken the same day and written on a second card. The studio answers its own messages, usually within one working day, and a return is handled by the same person who packed the parcel. Nothing here is scaled up, because the point of eight pieces is that each one can be checked properly.
Cloth is bought in short lengths from two mills, one in Bavaria and one across the border, and neither order is repeated until the first has been sewn and worn. A brown plaid is tested for how it presses at the seam, a khaki twill for whether it marks at the elbow after a day at a desk. Anything that pilled, shone or lost its colour in the first wash did not go into production, and the notes on those tests are kept with the pattern. It is a slow way to buy fabric and the reason the shop is small, but it is also why a jacket from two winters ago still closes the same way.