TIJUANA – The tailors in this city are virtually extinct.

It's more difficult every day to find a tailor on the border, which once boasted more than one hundred of them who made suits and dresses to size, mainly for American clients and politicians and artists from Mexico.

Some of the remaining craftsmen of the thread and needle said that their work is succumbing to industrial production, economic crises, crime, the inevitable death of some of the tailors and the lack of a new generation to take their place. Some acknowledge that their own failure to innovate contributed to their obsolescence.

"Strictly speaking, there are no more tailors in Tijuana, just 'fixers'; we fix hems, shoulders and sleeves on jackets and coats. Curiously, work that tailors previously despised," said Pedro Cerda González, 41 years old.

He's the owner of the tailor shop Charly, located Agua Caliente Boulevard, which in the 1990s made clothes for popular Mexican singer Juan Gabriel, the boxer Julio César Chávez and a few drug traffickers who ordered dozens of suits a year.

The work began to shrink in the last 25 years, he said. The master hand of the tailor was replaced by assembly plants that slashed the cost of clothes. It became "necessary" to change clothes every season to stay in style, he said, adding that the quality of fabrics and stitching degraded.

"It's a product of these times," said Ignacio Yáñez Varo, who spent 49 of his 80 years heading his own tailor shop, which closed its doors a few months ago.

"Everyone now wants to wear what's new, what's in fashion," he said. "No one bothers to go to a tailor shop and take all the time in the world to have a suit made.

"Those times are over. No one wants clothes that will last 20 years, made with good fabrics.

Everything now is disposable, sometimes even the year it was bought."

Yáñez Varo was one of the oldest tailors in the city. His clients included dozens of Americans, former Tijuana mayors and Baja California governors and leaders of social organizations and sports clubs.

But business began to dry up in the last 15 years, rents went up and he began to realize that closing his shop in the downtown sector was inevitable.

He packed up his things in late March. The only thing remaining in his tiny workshop was his sewing machine and a lamp.

"I don't think the price of the clothes made by a tailor was the problem since many stores sell more expensive ones," he said. "Rather, people lost the taste they once had. Today, they are not even aware that they're wearing a suit that doesn't fit them and if they are, they don't do anything about it."

Everardo Escalante Robles, a 73-year-old tailor, thinks the old fabrics had a distinct "soul." They were thicker, with studier weaves, which made each piece durable.

"Today, that would be impossible. In the actual world things are made to be used and thrown away, they are of low quality. But who cares? It's the culture of consumption," said Escalante Robles, who has been a tailor for 52 years, 36 of them for the shop that bears his name on Madero Street, between Ninth and Tenth downtown.

He has not closed his shop because his family wants him to remain active, although at times his children have helped pay the rent and utilities. The years when he made a dozen suits a week for San Diego residents are long past.

The tailors never formed an association and some admit that they weren't

particular friends. They agree, however, that there were about one hundred tailors in the city between 1950 and 1990 making traditional clothes. Today, they can be counted on one hand.

"Maybe that was our problem; we continued making the same things and many of our children, who could have had better ideas, didn't want to become tailors," said Yáñez Varo.

The tailors talk nostalgically of the shops, "sastrerías" in Spanish, with names such as Sastrerías Pérez, Fernández, Caballero Elegante, Cortadores de México, La moda al día, El príncipe y El rey de la moda, all in the downtown sector.

Several of these tailors had up to 200 Japanese sewing machines. Some even served clients along the entire Mexican Pacific Coast, dressing wealthy people for special occasions in Baja California, Sinaloa, Nayarit and Colima.

"People dressed very well then. They were satisfied with their one-of-a-kind clothes, they recommended us," said Escalante Robles. "That does not exist now."

Omar.millan@sandiegored.com