20TH CENTURY (POST
1950)
1952: Douglas
Fairbanks Jr declares, ‘Savile Row has recaptured the tailoring
supremacy of the world.’ Fairbanks Jr is one of the 20th century
heroes of Savile Row. It is recorded in Anderson & Sheppard’s
ledgers that he recommended Marlene Dietrich to the firm when she was
in England making the Russian revolution epic Knight Without Armour.
1953: Queen
Elizabeth II is crowned with the tailoring firms Wilkinson & Son
(owned by J. Dege & Sons) and Ede & Ravenscroft in attendance
at Westminster Abbey to dress the monarch, visiting royals and peers
of the realm for what is the most elaborate ceremonial occasion in
the nation’s calendar. The military uniforms, the ambassadors’
court dress and national and colonial liveries on display show off
the mastery of the grand old Savile Row houses of Henry Poole, Davies
& Son and Welsh & Jeffries.
1955: Hardy Amies is
granted The Queen’s Royal Warrant and remains court dressmaker
until his retirement in 2002. Stanley Lock takes over C E Phipps,
which was founded in 1898 to produce embroideries for the burgeoning
fashion industry.
1958: G.J. Cleverley
& Co, Savile Row’s preferred bespoke shoemaker, opens at 27
Cork Street in Mayfair. The firm goes on to make shoes for Sir
Winston Churchill, Laurence Olivier, Fred Astaire, Clark Gable and
Sir John Gielgud.
1959: Kilgour,
French & Stanbury create Cary Grant’s iconic suits for Alfred
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Savile Row is recognised as the
pinnacle of masculine elegance by cinema goers worldwide and North by
North West and Grant achieve for bespoke Savile Row tailoring what
Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s did for haute couture and
‘the little black dress’ two years later in 1961.
1961: Tragedy
strikes Henry Poole & Co. The lease expires on Poole’s Savile
Row palace and the company is forced to relocate to Cork Street.
Despite protests in The Daily Telegraph, Poole’s inexplicably
unlisted building is raised to the ground. Lost during this period
are the patterns cut for iconic Poole customers Napoleon III, Wilkie
Collins, Charles Dickens and Edward VII. Mercifully, the firm’s
ledgers survive. Hawes & Curtis predict a glowing future as a
‘first class tailor’ for apprentice John Pearse. Instead, Pearse
drops out, tours Europe, then opens the infamous boutique ‘Granny
Takes A Trip’ in the Kings Road in 1965, where he dresses Jimi
Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.
1963: Maurice
Sedwell opens his shop on Savile Row.
1966: H. Huntsman &
Sons is invited to make bespoke suits for the England football team
which wins the World Cup.
1967: Tommy Nutter
and Edward Sexton meet as salesboy and cutter respectively at
Donaldson, Williams & Ward in Burlington Arcade. They will go on
to form the most creative partnership in Savile Row’s history.
1969: Nutters of
Savile Row opens on Valentine’s Day and unleashes the Tommy
Nutter/Edward Sexton style on swinging London. Backed by Cilla Black
and The Beatles’ record company Apple’s executive Peter Brown,
Nutters of Savile Row dresses the entire social spectrum from the
Duke of Bedford and Lord Montagu to Mick and Bianca Jagger and The
Beatles. Nutters is the first shop on Savile Row to pioneer ‘open
windows’ and exhibits some wild displays by Simon Doonan. Mount
Street bespoke tailor to the stars Douglas Hayward dresses Michael
Caine in the famous bullion robbery caper The Italian Job. Caine’s
skinny suits and tone-on-tone white shirt and tie combinations set a
cocky, sharp tailored style that resonates today.
1971: Maverick
screen actress Katherine Hepburn, whose long-term lover Spencer
Tracey was a customer of Huntsman, takes the extraordinary step of
ordering bespoke denim jeans from her late lover’s Savile Row
tailor. Hepburn’s commission foreshadows bespoke denim collections
launched in 2006 by Timothy Everest and Evisu. Huntsman’s very
stylish Head Cutter Colin Hammick tops Savile Row devotees Rex
Harrison, Lord Snowdon and the Duke of Windsor in Tailor & Cutter
magazine’s prestigious best dressed list.
1973: Robert Redford
stars in the definitive film of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby. Fitzgerald was a dedicated customer of Jermyn Street bespoke
shirt maker Turnbull & Asser. The shirts that reduce The Great
Gatsby’s socialite heroine Daisy (Mia Farrow) to tears with their
beauty in the film all bear the Turnbull & Asser bespoke label.
1974: Gieves Ltd
acquires Hawkes (and the precious freehold of No 1 Savile Row) and
becomes Gieves & Hawkes.Tommy Nutter seeks sanctuary at Kilgour,
French & Stanbury after his acrimonious exit from Nutters of
Savile Row. Kilgour also incorporates the famed hunt tailoring
specialist Bernard Weatherill. Nutters of Savile Row continues with
Sexton, Roy Chittleborough and Joseph Morgan. Maurice Sedwell hires
Trinidad-born Andrew Ramroop who will go on to become Managing
Director and a Professor of tailoring at the London College of
Fashion.
1976: Gieves &
Hawkes and Anderson & Sheppard alumnus Anthony Hewitt opens his
own bespoke tailoring shop on Savile Row, A.J.Hewitt. The company
prospers thanks to the Middle Eastern oil boom and the advent of
young cutters Ravi Tailor and James Levett in 1979.
1978: 007 actor
Roger Moore becomes a tax exile and invites his friend and tailor
Douglas Hayward to his Cote d’Azur villa to dress him for the next
James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. It is acknowledged that Hayward’s
back-to-classic navy pinstripe three-piece suit is Bond at his
sartorial best.
1979: Davies &
Son is forced to leave its handsome Hanover Street townhouse where a
private room had been set aside for King George V that was fitted
with a tube not dissimilar to a hose pipe to communicate with the
tailors upstairs. While clearing out the attic sets, which were
reserved as places of assignation for titled customers to meet their
mistresses, the firm discovers a bill for Sir Robert Peel (founder of
London’s first police force) from 1829.
1980: A year into
Margaret Thatcher’s reign as British Prime Minister, Andrew Ramroop
becomes unofficial tailor to half the Tory Cabinet, which restores a
pride in Savile Row bespoke tailoring to the corridors of power in
the Palace of Westminster.
1981: H.M.Sultan
Qaboos of Oman confers his exotic Royal Warrant on J.Dege & Sons.
In arguably the most exotic commission conferred on a Savile Row
tailor, Sultan Qaboos commanded Dege & Skinner to create uniforms
for his Royal Oman Police Camel Pipe Band.
1981: H.R.H. The
Prince of Wales marries Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral.
Gieves & Hawkes make the uniform for Prince Charles while the
pageboys – including Lord Frederick Windsor and Edward van Cutsem –
are dressed in Naval Cadet uniforms that were originally made by the
firm for Prince Charles’s Grandfather King George VI and his Great
Uncle The Duke of Windsor when they served as Royal Navy Cadets
aboard H.M.S. Britannia. Roy Chittleborough & Joseph Morgan part
company with Edward Sexton and continue trading under their own
names. Edward Sexton opens his shop at 37 Savile Row and cements his
reputation as Savile Row’s jet setting export, establishing a
formidable business in the United States.
1982: Henry Poole MD
Angus Cundey brings the firm back to Savile Row after twenty-years in
exile on Cork Street.
1984: 24 year old
East Ender Mark Powell opens Powell & Co on Soho’s Archer
Street. His look – a re-mix of sartorial influences such as
Neo-Edwardian, 30s Mobster and 60s Kray twin chic – pays homage to
the creativity of Tommy Nutter and paves the way for the new
generation of Savile Row tailors of the 1990s.
1985: After an
encounter with Federico Fellini in Rome and a subsequent career as a
maverick filmmaker, John Pearse returns to tailoring and opens a shop
on Soho’s Meard Street.
1990: H.R.H. The
Prince of Wales appoints Welsh & Jeffries his military tailor.
1991: Former Tommy
Nutter apprentice Timothy Everest – who answered Nutter’s
newspaper advertisement for a ‘Boy Wanted’ – opens his first
bespoke tailoring shop in an East End Georgian townhouse declaring,
‘Opening a shop on Savile Row would be like moving in with my
parents.’
1992: Richard James,
the first of the ‘New Generation’ tailors, opens a shop on Savile
Row. James introduces Saturday opening (a revolution on Savile Row)
and a fashionable edge not seen since the house of Nutter’s glory
days. Tommy Nutter dies. As a fitting epitaph, the outlandish purple
suit Jack Nicholson wears playing The Joker, which was one of
Nutter’s final commissions, appears on screen in Tim Burton’s
Batman Returns.
1996: Ozwald Boateng
unleashes his exotic, electric concept of Bespoke Couture on Savile
Row from his new shop at No 9 Vigo Street.
1997: Ozwald
Boateng, Richard James and Timothy Everest are christened ‘The New
Generation’ on Savile Row and photographed by Michael Roberts for
the London Swings Again issue of Vanity Fair. Alan Bennett buys
Davies & Son, and incorporates Johns & Pegg, James &
James, and Wells of Mayfair. Gianni Versace is shot dead outside his
Miami palazzo. It emerges that in his later years the designer had
become a bespoke customer at J. Dege & Sons (now Dege &
Skinner), in addition to buying made-to-measure from Richard James.
Diana, Princess of Wales is tragically killed in a car accident with
Dodi Al Fayed in Paris on August 30th. Orders under construction for
the Princess that were never collected are still held by Maurice
Sedwell on Savile Row, John Lobb on St James’s Street and Turnbull
& Asser on Jermyn Street.
1998: A.J. Hewitt
acquires the colonial bespoke tailoring specialist Airey &
Wheeler.
21ST CENTURY
2000: Richard James
acquires the biggest shop space on Savile Row at No 29. The ‘goldfish
bowl’ glass windows slice Savile Row and Clifford Street at right
angles like a breathtaking infinity pool of bespoke, made-to-measure
and ready-to-wear Richard James.
2001: Former
Huntsman head cutter Richard Anderson opens his bespoke tailoring
house at No 13 Savile Row. His partner and co-founder is Brian
Lishak, a Huntsman man with half a century of experience on the Row.
Having apprenticed while still at St Martin’s fashion college with
Edward Sexton, Stella McCartney invites Sexton to develop the
tailoring for her debut as creative director of Chloe. On the
embroidery front, S. Lock and M. Hand come together to form Hand &
Lock.
2002: In an
intriguing collaboration, former Anderson & Sheppard apprentice
and enfant terrible of British fashion Alexander McQueen unveils a
bespoke collection made by H. Huntsman & Sons. The exquisite but
prohibitively costly enterprise is quietly terminated. Nick Hart
opens Spencer Hart at 36 Savile Row, combining a bespoke sensibility
with the severe chic of old school Prada, Jil Sander and Helmut Lang.
He goes on to dress David Bowie, Jay-Z, Jamie Foxx and Kanye West.
2003: After a
management buyout, Kilgour drops the French & Stanbury and
appoints Carlo Brandelli as creative director. The house sets about
‘sexing-up’ Savile Row in a strategy not dissimilar to Tom Ford’s
at Gucci in 1995. Sir Hardy Amies, a Savile Row legend and one of its
greatest patrons, dies. He is succeeded by his protégée Ian
Garlant, who remains creative director of the house.
2004: The Savile Row
Bespoke Association, the organisation designed to represent bespoke
tailors’ interests on the Row, is formed. Founder members include
the Royal Family of bespoke tailoring: Anderson & Sheppard, Dege
& Skinner, Gieves & Hawkes and Henry Poole. Having flirted
with liquidation, H. Huntsman & Sons is saved by four sympathetic
investors including present MD David Coleridge. The Savile Row
Bespoke Association acts to protect the craft and good name of Savile
Row and ward off interlopers by registering the Savile Row Bespoke
Association label. The label is to appear in each of the Savile Row
Bespoke Association members’ bespoke garments and serves as a
guarantee to the customer that he or she is in receipt of a genuine,
bespoke, made on Savile Row piece of clothing.
2005: Anderson &
Sheppard is forced to vacate No 30 Savile Row and relocate to 32 Old
Burlington Street. Gieves & Hawkes make morning coats for The
Princes William and Harry to wear at the wedding of their father
Prince Charles to Camilla Parker-Bowles (now Duchess of Cornwall).
Timothy Everest edges closer to Savile Row with a bespoke and
made-to-measure studio on Bruton Place in Mayfair. Young entrepreneur
Patrick Grant and his investors acquire Norton & Sons from the
Granger family. Tom Ford exits Gucci Group as creative director and
commissions Anderson & Sheppard to make white tie and tails for a
defiant photo shoot in W magazine to publicise the launch of his own
bespoke tailoring house. Embroiderers Hand & Lock move to
Margaret Street.
2006: Gieves, the
fashion-led boutique brand within Gieves & Hawkes designed by Joe
Casely-Hayford, is shown on the catwalk during Paris Fashion Week for
the first time. Henry Poole’s Savile Row lease is signed for a
further 15 years and both shop and workshops are gutted and
refurbished to bring Poole’s into the 21st Century. Ozwald
Boateng’s US reality TV show The House of Boateng is aired on
Robert Redford’s Sundance Channel and brings his vision of New
Generation Savile Row dandyism to the cable generation.
Chittleborough & Morgan open a new space in the basement of No 12
Savile Row. Richard Anderson rocks the Row with a black sequin dinner
jacket that is ordered by Bryan Ferry and photographed worldwide.
Douglas Hayward’s daughter Polly succeeds her father as MD of the
company.
2007: Florentine
fashion foundation Pitti Immagine Uomo commission the first major
exhibition dedicated to Savile Row bespoke tailoring. Titled The
London Cut, The exhibition runs for a month at Palazzo Pitti and is
accompanied by a book written by the curator James Sherwood. The
Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture invites Savile Row to bring The
London Cut to the British Ambassador’s residence in Paris during
July Couture Week. Richard James opens a new shop on Clifford Street
dedicated entirely to his bespoke service while Ozwald Boateng takes
Anderson & Sheppard’s old site at No 30 Savile Row for his
first flagship store and cutting room. After a brief, unhappy
marriage between Japanese jeans brand Evisu and Anthony J Hewitt,
Hewitt MD Ravi Tailor leaves the Row to work from L.G. Wilkinson on
St George’s Street. Robert Gieve, the fifth and last generation of
the family to serve Gieves & Hawkes, dies.
2008: The legendary
celebrity tailor Douglas (The Italian Job) Hayward dies. A new
Archive Room at Gieves & Hawkes at No 1 Savile Row is curated by
James Sherwood and inaugurated in honour of the late Robert Gieve. In
March 2008 The London Cut exhibition is invited to show at the
British Ambassador’s Residence in Tokyo. A satellite exhibition
then travels to Isetan in Tokyo where Savile Row dominates the
prestigious store’s windows and exhibition space. A three one-hour
episide documentary mapping a year in the life of Savile Row is aired
on BBC4 while BBC2 follows The London Cut to Tokyo for a further
British fashion series to be aired in the autumn. One of the Row’s
best dressed men, former Huntsman Head Cutter Brian Hammick, sadly
dies.
2009: Queues form
when Savile Row puts on its revealing ‘Below the Row’ show for
one of the Victoria & Albert museum’s Friday Late exhibitions.
Curated in conjunction with the V&A by students Chris Pollard and
Susan Paisley, the exhibition shines light on the ‘dark art’ of
bespoke tailoring by creating a working tailor’s shop and rarely
seen subterranean workshop. The public’s increasing interest in the
inner goings on of the Row is served with the publication of Richard
Anderson’s fascinating book Bespoke: Savile Row Ripped &
Smooth.
2010: Savile Row
gathers en masse at the vibrantly refurbished Savoy hotel in London
to celebrate the publication of James Sherwood’s definitive study
of the Row’s inhabitants and their craft, Savile Row: The Master
Tailors of British Bespoke. To help the occasion along, the Savoy
invents the Savile Row Collins, a fine, stealthy gin based cocktail.
Onlookers are agog as sheep appear on a grassed over Row for the
hugely successful Savile Row Field Day, which is held in support of
the Campaign for Wool, whose aim it is to increase demand and
awareness of the wool industry.
2011: Another
insider’s account of life on the Row as Michael Skinner’s (he of
Dege & Skinner) enthralling book The Savile Row Cutter is
published. The 150th anniversary of the tuxedo is celebrated by its
inventor Henry Poole & Co and students of the London College of
Fashion, who, in conjunction with fabric supplier Dormeuil, set about
re-inventing the iconic jacket. The 21st century tuxedos go on
display in Harrods and Burlington Arcade in London before appearing
at the tuxedo historical society in New York. Does any other jacket
have its own historical society?
2012: Emma Martin of
Dege & Skinner wins BBC3’s jazz themed Young Tailor of the Year
award, with her Oxford Bags wowing the judges. Savile Row is the
scene of a very well dressed protest as scores of readers of The Chap
magazine assemble outside No. 3 to protest against Abercrombie &
Fitch’s plans to take over the building. June, and the tailors of
the Row play their part in the British Fashion Council’s inaugural
London Collections: Men by hosting Savile Row Open Day (see the News
section) and a stunning cocktail party in Burlington Arcade.
2013: Savile Row’s
stunning contribution to the second London Collections: Men is The
English Gentleman at Spencer House. Sixty models are dressed by the
Row’s tailors and effortlessly demonstrate that Savile Row remains
the centre of classic men’s style. March, and the Savile Row Room
opens at The Campaign For Wool’s Wool House exhibition at Somerset
House with queues quickly forming for the cutting and tailoring
masterclass demonstrations. An exciting new chapter begins for
Huntsman as internationally acclaimed couturier Roubi L’Roubi takes
the reins of this most venerable of Savile Row houses as owner and
Creative Director.
2014: The Row makes
its own inimitable contribution to London Collections: Men men’s
fashion week with its brilliantly original The English Gentleman
presentation at The Cabinet War Rooms in January and the fascinating
Meet Me in Rio film in July. May sees Open Row, as our members work
together with our partners Chivas to open their doors and give 300
style-conscious individuals a never before behind-the-scenes look at
the workings of our famous street.
2015: The year gets
off to a flying start with Savile Row’s The English Gentleman
taking up the prestigious closing spot of January’s London
Collections: Men with another eye-catching presentation of the art of
bespoke tailoring and contemporary men’s style, this time at Apsley
House, the palatial London home of the Duke of Wellington. To
coincide with LC:M, the revered Huntsman opens an in-house pop-up
store at 11 Savile Row to showcase the collection of clothing
inspired by the role of a fictional spy HQ that it plays in the major
new feature film Kingsman: The Secret Service.
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