Inside a stark office building across the street from Grand Central Terminal, a portly Indian man stands face-to-face with fame. All 6-foot-4-inches of it.
With a measuring ribbon around his neck, 60-year-old tailor Mohan “Mike” Ramchandani nips and tucks at NBA legend Walt “Clyde” Frazier.
The self-professed clotheshorse has more than 500 suits in all colors of the rainbow with matching pocket squares and ties, all made to order by Ramchandani himself.
“I’ve been voted best-dressed athlete a lot of times,” says Frazier, who’s been coming to the tailor twice a year since the ’80s for new threads, including today’s buttery yellow suit complete with white jacquard monogrammed shirt, powder blue gator shoes and a gold pocket chain.
“I come here and tell them to show me the stuff no one else wants. I know I’ll like it.”
He’s not the only one.
Ramchandani has styled former mayors Rudolph Giuliani (conservative, two-button suit in blue and gray) and Ed Koch (classic, no darts, straight pants and suspender buttons), along with Mets shortstop Jose Reyes ($12,000 worth of four-button baggy business suits with longer jackets and triple pleated pants).
Other clients include NFL player Ed “Too Tall” Jones, Gary Carter, Charles Oakley, Bernie Williams and more Knicks than he can remember.
Thanks, in part, to one very famous one.
“She said, ‘If you make his suit, you will be lucky in the future,’ ” Ramchandani says of the call he received from Patrick Ewing’s mom, who got his number from her friend, a nurse who delivered Ramchandani’s son at Elmhurst Hospital in 1978.
At the time, Ewing was just a basketball star at Georgetown University needing dapper duds for his internship at Sen. Bob Dole’s office. “I didn’t know who he was,” admits Ramchandani. “I wasn’t following the basketball.”
Despite his reluctance to fork over $29 for a People’s Express plane ticket to measure a 7-foot-tall kid in his dorm room for a $150 silver herringbone suit, Ramchandani did it anyway. It changed his life.
Once Ewing started playing for the Knicks, Ramchandani became his permanent tailor, and Ewing became the official face of the brand, championing it all around town.
Decades later, Ramchandani, with his heavy accent and unapologetic lack of pop culture knowledge, can’t keep all the athletes straight and doesn’t know who plays for which team or what sport. All he knows is that a guy needs a good suit. Actually,
several of them.
“Every man needs 15 suits — some solid, some stripes and one plaid,” he says. “They need blazers, a sports jacket and 20 to 30 shirts and one tuxedo.”
Sometimes they even need a suit with a pocket big enough for an iPad. Stephen Colbert has scheduled a fitting for the $600 iPad suit with Ramchandani for late July, even though he joked on his show that the tailor is “literally riding on my coattails” and that he is the “inventor” of the style. Colbert first sported the look (from another label) at this year’s Grammys.
For Ramchandani, fabric is the only profession he’s ever known. It began at his father’s clothing store in Ahmedabad, India, where at just 10 years old he was a combination salesman/janitor before moving to Hong Kong to learn the rag trade, and then immigrating to the US in 1972. Today, he employs his 22-year-old daughter, Roma, as his bookkeeper and his 31-year-old son, Victor, as his partner.
He has more than 5,000 fabric swatches — a special wool blended with diamond fragments costs $4,000, while Italian cashmeres are $8,000 — with best sellers ranging from new cooling technology that keeps the wearer from overheating, as well as woolens from Italian suitmaker Ermenegildo Zegna.
On a typical day, he sees three clients and spends more than an hour with each one. And while all the initial consultation of fitting and styling is done in his office, the suits are all sewn in Hong Kong. The entire process takes about a month.
Ramchandani says these days clients — who spend an average of $1,000 for a suit — prefer tapered pants, fitted jackets and classic European styling, making it easier for local movers and shakers to get debonair duds without flying to Savile Row.
As client Walt Frasier would no doubt agree, when it comes to style, Ramchandani is a slam dunk.