A Man of Cloth


Emmanuel Dakis worked as a tailor in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Windsor for more than 40 years. In this time, the decor of his small shop has remained largely untouched, which is part of its charm. A Windsor local myself, I’d photographed Emmanuel and his environs on numerous occasions. I admired his quiet resilience; arriving in Australia as a seventeen year old migrant who went on to establish himself as one of Melbourne’s finest tailors against the odds. After his death in 2022, I went back to photograph the shop again, finding suits and cloth dating back to the 1970s, often with their original labels intact.