SAVILE ROW NEWS: Savile Row is back in style — so why is the street so empty?

 

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.”