Label Review – Andy The-Anh and Bedo

It’s The Itchy Season

Bedo is a Canadian-based brand since 1975, offering 6 trend induced collections a year. Style-wise, I don’t have much to say about the brand, other than that it does well for itself as far a trends go, but I thought I should have a look and check out the quality of their clothing.

It’s Fall, so the entire collection has a lot of wool blends. Unfortunately, being that they’re all about “affordable” prices, they don’t use good wool blends. They use the super itchy kind, as I’ve learned at my time at Pellegrino, itchy wool are threads of yarn made of the shortest wool hair (from the back of the neck of the sheep), thus when twisted together, the short end hairs stick out, giving you that itchy feeling. Over time, your itchy wool yarns will tear because the short hairs can’t hold together. High quality wool are made of long hair taken from the back of the sheep, thus feel silky and smooth to the touch. They’re also the most expensive, especially the worsted (tightly twisted) kind.

That being said, I touched nearly the entire Fall collection by hand. All of it felt surprisingly itchy. If I touched anything smooth it was probably of cotton blend and or didn’t use wool at all. So their website and lookbooks may look really nice on paper, but go and touch for yourself, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

Andy The-Anh – Made in Poland

I must admit that this is a disappointment coming from a man who has such a great sense of design and style. I have much respect for Andy The-Anh, but unfortunately, he’s lost some brownie points on quality.

I recently bought a white pencil skirt from his store from his Spring 2008 collection, and it was delightfully on sale for $170, originally priced at $300. I checked it (or thought I did), tried it on, loved it, bought it, end of story right?

I showed the skirt to my boyfriend, proud that I bought something so nice at a discount. He immediately checked the bottom hems and already found a hanging thread that threatened to unravel the hemline. Apparently, the stitching of the lining and the skirt has been shoddily done. Supposedly this hemline should be solid, but because of the stitching method (which leaves faint stitching traces on the surface), it barely kept both the main fabric and lining together. My boyfriend suspects it was a way to cut cost by choosing to use this cheap stitching method (who knew?). He suggested that I should cut the thread before it unraveled any further, and there’s really no method of repairing this at home and would have to seek professional help to get it fixed.

Further investigation has also led me to discover some crooked stitching of the lining and a few end threads sticking out.

Granted, I know I didn’t pay $1000 for this skirt and could probably forgive the crooked stitching, but the loose bottom thread is a real disappointment. This comes from a store that sells $1000 cashmere knit coats, so I was expecting better. So lesson learned: when buying skirts try to get past how gorgeous it looks and check the insides more thoroughly.