Savile Row is back in style — so why is the street so
empty?
Tailoring’s most famous destination has spent 50 years
grappling with the existential threat of ready-to-wear
Charlie
Porter APRIL 18 2023
https://www.ft.com/content/70ac37b8-d49d-402c-8fa6-240578773e4c
Savile Row
is back in fashion. Or, at least, an idea of it is. At Alexander McQueen’s
recent co-ed autumn/winter 2023 show, creative director Sarah Burton described
the tailored collection as “almost back to the beginnings of McQueen on Savile
Row”. She was referring to founder Lee McQueen’s teenage apprenticeships in the
1980s at Anderson & Sheppard and Gieves & Hawkes, where he learnt the
exactitude of cut.
It was a
mood echoed at Stella McCartney, a designer who also cut her teeth on Savile
Row, with her opening look of a brown plaid three-piece suit, worn with no
shirt beneath. For the Balenciaga show, the invite was a complete pattern for a
regular fit jacket. It was an attempt to reset the image of the brand — moving
away from logo hoodies and trainers (and a controversial holiday gifting
campaign) to the precise constructions the house was reputed for under its
founder Cristóbal Balenciaga.
But Savile
Row itself can feel unloved. The old bank building that anchors the street sits
empty; its previous tenants, Abercrombie & Fitch, moved out in 2021. 2
Savile Row is now occupied by art gallery Pilar Corrias; 5 Savile Row sits
empty. If Savile Row is back in fashion, why is no one fighting for these
addresses?
It’s now 39
years since LVMH co-founder Bernard Arnault bought Christian Dior for a
symbolic one franc, kick-starting the luxury conglomerate era. No one has since
taken an equivalent storied Savile Row tailor and turned it into a
billion-dollar monolith of ready-to-wear, accessories and fragrance.
Our idea of
Savile Row tailoring was founded over 220 years ago, when society figure Beau
Brummell asked his tailor to cut his coat and trousers with clean lines. His
look ran counter to the fripperies of King George III’s court, setting a new
fashion for sleek tailoring. From this evolved the bespoke suit, which was
popular until the 1970s.
“Turn the
clock back 50 years, and if you wanted a suit, you pretty much had to have it
made for you,” says William Skinner, managing director of Dege & Skinner, a
tailor established in 1865 that now occupies 10 Savile Row. Skinner is the
fifth generation of master tailors in his family. “That changed with the advent
of ready-to-wear.” It’s the existential threat that Savile Row has grappled
with since.
Over the
years, some have tried to align bespoke and ready-to-wear. In 2012, Savile
Row’s tailors were heralded as anchors for London’s own men’s fashion week,
organised by the British Fashion Council. That schedule no longer exists, and
some of the tailors who took part, such as Hardy Amies, have since closed their
doors. Gieves & Hawkes was seen as a key brand of the schedule, attempting
to channel a bespoke lifestyle into ready-to-wear products. Last year, its
then-owners Trinity Group went into administration. In November 2022, Gieves
& Hawkes was bought by Frasers Group, owners of Sports Direct.
You can’t force-feed people bespoke, you have to draw
them in
This is set
against the global shift from formal dressing to casual, compounded by the
pandemic and work-from-home culture. It can seem like Savile Row’s decline is
inevitable, a square peg in the round hole of the fashion industry.
This
assumption is compounded by the megabrand status of Parisian couture houses,
the equivalent of Savile Row tailors: Dior, Chanel, Balenciaga. Most of the storied
houses still standing branched into ready-to-wear in the 1950s and 60s. Most
now also design menswear. They also expanded into higher-margin categories
early on. Coco Chanel launched her first perfume back in 1921. Christian Dior
debuted his first fragrance, Miss Dior, the same year he unveiled his “New
Look”, and sold stockings and gloves from his first years in business.
Many Savile
Row tailors have also diversified into ready-to-wear and accessories, if less
lucratively. But most remain firmly committed to delivering what their houses
were founded to do: made-to-measure suits.
“You can’t
force-feed people bespoke,” says Campbell Carey, the head cutter and creative
director of Huntsman, which sits at 11 Savile Row. “You have to draw them in.”
When I
visited Carey in February, we talked in the first floor meeting room.
Downstairs, a new client was being charmed in the ways of the house: told
stories of past customers, such as Gregory Peck, while being shown different
cuts of possible suits. Meanwhile, in the warren of workrooms over three
floors, a team of 11 cutters and 30 tailors worked at full pelt. The company is
comfortably in the black, with an operating profit of £3.4mn on sales of
£18.5mn in 2021, according to Companies House filings. Revenues from its small
ready-to-wear line, which Carey calls an “accessible extension” of its bespoke
ethos, have grown fivefold since 2019.
Huntsman
acts like a tailor first, rather than pretending to be a fashion brand. “You’re
pleasing no one by falling down that trap,” says Carey. “Clients who’ve shopped
with you for 20 years go, ‘What are you doing? It’s not what this house is
about’. And the young guys that you’re supposed to be appealing to go,” Carey
shakes his head. “It easily gets sussed out.”
Carey
states that much of his work is correcting the mistakes of tailoring’s recent
past, which did not put focus on education. “When I started in 1988,” he says,
“it was me and a bunch of old guys in the cutting room near retirement. In the
’80s and ’90s the Savile Row tailors got greedy with their resources, they
didn’t think to future-proof their businesses.” That meant scant attention to
training the next generation.
“I don’t
want to be the old guy who hangs on to the fiefdom of his knowledge,” he says,
talking with pride about the tailors he has trained as apprentices. “I want
them to take the reins.”
For new
tailors, the winds are against them. Cloth prices are rising through inflation,
and also from import duties following the UK’s exit from the European Union.
Rents on Savile Row are astronomical: into six-figure annual sums. Tailors
setting out on their own are having to make their mark elsewhere.
“We live in
what used to be the village store,” says Ritchie Charlton, a fourth generation
tailor, trained on Savile Row but now based in a village in Kent. Charlton most
recently worked as head tailor at Alexander McQueen, which had a menswear shop
on Savile Row for much of the 2010s. There, he made custom suits for the likes
of Eddie Redmayne and Bobby Gillespie.
Now set up
as a bespoke tailor in his own right, his client list remains private. For
fittings, he travels to them. “It suits me to work from here,” he said.
“Being a
tailor in London as a one-man band is super difficult. Having our house as my
studio-cum-tailor’s shop, it keeps my overheads down, which keeps the cost of
the suit down, too.”
Charlton
believes in doing every step properly, including hand-sewing in the sleeves. “I
know it makes very little difference if you were to see one side-by-side with
machine shoulders,” he said, “but there’s a feel thing there. It has real body
and a kind of tension that you don’t get when it’s put together by a machine.”
Of course,
fashion and tailoring can be in dialogue, if done with respect. In January,
British designer Grace Wales Bonner asked Charlton to cut the opening coat and
closing jacket for her autumn/winter 2023 show in Paris. “I think what Wales
Bonner does is very interesting, because the clothes have volume and elegance,”
says Charlton. “None of it is uptight, it’s a very fluid thing.”
Charlton
has no desire to become a ready-to-wear designer himself. His focus is on
bespoke suits, and his clients. “I do it how it’s always been done,” he says,
“but obviously with modern cutting, and hopefully with a bit of style.”
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