It all began 70 years ago in 1953. Munich was called “Germany’s secret capital”. Back then Berlin was far away behind the iron curtain, Hamburg was, well, the “gate to the world but nothing more” as Karl Lagerfeld once stated, and Bonn was the official capital of Western Germany but only a tiny bland city. But Munich started booming. After the war numerous corporations like Siemens moved their headquarters to the Bavarian capital and with money, students and creatives surging into the city a huge scene emerged. It was the dawn of the “Schickeria”, time to party, to overcome old traditions and to show success and wealth more and more freely.

Hans Reiser opened his store in the center of Munich’s creative and fashionable district of Schwabing and hit the bullseye: his shop became legendary, the place to go to for the finest handmade shirts in Munich, the who-is-who of Germany among his customers.

Speaking of film: the Bavaria film studios, located in the southern Munich suburbs, were the Hollywood of Germany. Reiser started making shirts for all of them, for movie directors as well as for international movie stars. The cooperation with several of Germany’s top studios and Reiser shirts playing parts in international blockbusters lasts till today.

One of Reiser’s regular customers remembers sitting in the classy Café Luitpold as a student together with his father and his friends and business partners proudly recounting to them his first fitting for his first Reiser bespoke shirt. Of course, all present gentlemen wore also Reiser bespoke shirts! And now even his sons come to Reiser to have their shirts tailored. And this is not a single case: Reiser dresses quite several customers in the third generation. It is exactly this, the long-lasting customer relationship, that is one of the most important parts of the Reiser DNA. It is even possible to physically experience it in the vast customer archive: the individual cutting patterns on yellowing paper, evolving with the clients’ body shapes over the years and decades. Some look like tree rings with paper being taken away and added again and again.

It was 1979 when Hans Reiser decided to “retire between Isar and the Adriatic Sea” as he called it. The 28 years old Joseph Fent took over. He was working at one of the most important international fashion institutions of the time: the Mode Woche München. With his wife working at Reiser since several years he decided to invest and to switch jobs. The wild days were not over yet even though the rise of the luxury labels with their convenient off the rack products started to make life harder for bespoke tailors of suits and shirts.

Sadly, Joseph Fent died in a car crash with his Porsche five years later leaving his wife Helene Fent alone and in charge of Reiser Hemden with its 25 employees. And the business of bespoke tailoring was getting harder and harder: made-to-measure evolved as a competing production method – an inferior product to bespoke tailoring but with much lower production costs resulting in a much lower price to the consumer. Therefore, the next 20 years saw a constant decline in shirt production numbers of Reiser Hemden.

It was until 2004 when Martin Weigand stepped in as a new investor. With his new assistant Daniela Kopp, he moved the shop from Schwabing to another central part of Munich: the Lehel. He merged shirt production and shop in one single representative location. But it was another of his ideas that changed Reiser’s fate for the next decades: not to rely on bespoke shirts alone but to offer the whole palette of an exclusive men’s outfitters – especially made-to-measure suits. Whereas in earlier times the clients could only buy their black-tie shirts at “Reiser Hemden” they now were able to buy the whole tuxedo at “Reiser Manufaktur”, too.

After nearly 20 years of Martin Weigand as owner and managing he decided to relocate to Europe’s south in 2022. The relationship between Reiser and its customers is so extraordinary that a group of Reiser’s long-standing regulars decided to become investors with Daniela Kopp as new managing director. They committed themselves to the future fate of the company 70 years after Hans Reiser opened his shop in Schwabing.

Because bespoke tailoring is slowly regaining its significance in fashion these days where the exclusiveness of the large luxury labels fades. Consumerism, mass production, conformism and hugely overpriced but inferior products versus a traditional art and craft that locally manufactures truly individual products of the highest possible standards that can be repaired or altered even after decades of use. This is the challenge –  and Reiser Manufaktur accepted. Here’s to the next 70 years!

Photography by Martin Wurzer