SAVILE ROW
CONCOURS31ST MAY 2023
Patrick Grant: My life on Savile Row
By Daniel
Evans
https://savilerow-style.com/lifestyle/savile-row-concours/patrick-grant-my-life-on-savile-row/
As the sun
beats down on Savile Row, bouncing off the prestige and classic cars on display
outside Britain’s finest tailoring establishments, Patrick Grant, director of
Norton & Sons, is very much in his element. He is delighted to see the Row
packed with enthusiasts of both fine clothing and exotic cars as the second
Savile Row Concours gets underway and he feels the future is looking good for
the home of high-class tailoring. “I started at Norton’s in 2005 and, back
then, the number of young people looking for apprenticeships on this street was
pretty low,” he says. “We probably got one person a month coming in to ask
about apprenticeships. I was then involved with a BBC documentary about Savile
Row which sparked a lot of interest. After it went out, the phone was ringing
off the hook. Making things is becoming cool again and I think, for many young
people, a job with your hands where you are using your skill and your brain to
produce something of exquisite quality is now seen as a cool job to have in a
way for a long time it wasn’t.
“After we
made that documentary, there was an immediate change in the number of people
who were coming to apply for jobs here. We went from about one a month to two
or three a week. Now, happily for Savile Row, the position with apprenticeships
is very buoyant. There are far more people applying for apprenticeships than we
have places to teach.”
Patrick is
certainly one of the more high profile tailors on the Row. As well as his
involvement with Norton & Sons, he fronted a TV documentary about military
uniforms ahead of the Coronation, has been presenting The Great British Sewing
Bee since 2013 and is currently doing some work with King Charles (about which
more later).
First,
Patrick tells how he became involved with Norton & Sons. “I was finishing
off my post grad and I happened to be reading the Financial Times and there it
was, at the back in the businesses for sale section,” he recalls. “I couldn’t
believe it! There was this little advert – For Sale, tailors to emperors, kings
and presidents. I thought this can’t be real but it was. I flogged everything I
could find to sell, including my house and my car.
“This year,
we are 202 years old which makes us one of the oldest tailors on the street. We
have always done tailoring. It’s a wonderful business. We’ve never been one of
the big, shouty ones. It’s always been the one that connoisseurs will track down.
We’ve enjoyed being almost under the radar but not quite. We were big on making
clothes for people who travelled and explored. Even today we have some
customers who are polar explorers and people who do mad things like take pianos
to tribes in the middle of the Amazon.
“Lord
Carnarvon was a customer so Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened by a man wearing a
lightweight suit – although it didn’t look that lightweight, to be honest. It
looks like it’s about 25 ounces from the photographs. We’ve always made lightweight,
unstructured stuff. Everyone thinks the Italians were the only people to do
lightweight tailoring but Brits, for good reason and for bad, spent a lot of
time in hot places and they needed clothes to wear too and Norton’s was one of
the houses that specialised in lightweight, unstructured stuff that you could
wear in countries where it was 40 degrees all the time. We still have those
skills in-house today.”
Patrick
knows the fashion industry does not have a good reputation when it comes to
green credentials and is aware that sustainability has shot up the agenda. “We
need to buy fewer things,” he says. “We need to consume less and we need to
consume better things that are going to last longer and are not going to have
any damaging effects on the environment on the way in and certainly aren’t
going to have any damaging effects on the environment on the way out.
“We need to
get out of the habit of buying lots of inexpensive things. The inexpensive
stuff has got so cheap. You can go and buy a pair of shoes for a tenner –
polyurethane top glued on to a plastic bottom. Horrible stuff that’s doing
terrible things to the environment at every stage of its production then when
the sole falls off, which it will do after you’ve worn it about three times, it
goes in the bin and ends up in landfill and never biodegrades. Instead of that,
you could get a pair of shoes that are made out of something that’s a
by-product of our food industry, that’s totally natural and biodegradable and
will last you for ages and every time it needs repairing, you can take it to
somebody who can fix it for you. So, you’re putting more money into the
economy.
“I still
have a dinner suit of my dad’s which was made in the 1930s by a tailor in
Edinburgh. It’s a bit agricultural but it is bombproof. I wore it all through
university, both under grad and post grad, I’ve crawled through hedges
backwards in it but you give it a brush and it looks as good as new. It’s
coming up for its 90th birthday and it’s still in perfect nick. I’ve got a
couple of other pieces from my dad which were made in the 1930s and jackets
from my grandad made in the 1950s which are still great. It’s not just that the
clothes are good but the more you wear these things, they pick up history and
become part of the story of your life, your interactions with your friends. We
can remember wearing things at a particular occasion and that gives them value
too. Every time you repair something, it adds to its value.”
Patrick saw
a great example of longevity while he was making the programme about uniforms
for the BBC ahead of the Coronation. “As part of that documentary, we went to a
firm in Birmingham called Firmin which makes buttons. It’s the most incredible
place on earth. There is equipment in that factory which dates back to the
1650s. They help make the Household Cavalry helmets and they have an old
blacksmith’s elm that was there when the business was formed in 1655 and they
still use it. After seeing it on TV, a lot of people got in touch, all saying
the same thing: ‘Isn’t all of this craft wonderful and shouldn’t we all do more
to preserve it?’ Of course we should, but that means putting your money where
your mouth is. Don’t buy ten cheap things, buy one good thing and care for it.
Make it last and enjoy it because you will enjoy wearing that one good thing so
much more than ten inexpensive things.”
More
recently, Patrick has talked about working with King Charles. “I’ve met him on
many occasions,” says Patrick. “He is a lover of beautiful things – a lover of
clothes and a lover of craftsmanship. He is a great example of how to live with
stuff for a very long time. He was having some new dress shoes made by
Tricker’s (in Northampton) but he loved the ribbon on his old dress shoes so he
asked Tricker’s to take the ribbon off the old shoes (which were probably
around 50 years old) and put them on his new shoes. It was the connection with
the past, with everywhere those old shoes would have been. There’s something
intangible there that adds to the value of our clothes – the more we wear them,
the more we keep them.”
In 2018,
Patrick became co-chair of the Prince of Wales’ charity Future Textiles, an
organisation that works towards creating jobs in the UK’s garment making
industry. “It’s an amazing charity,” explains Patrick. “It teaches young people
to sew. The main sewing school is in Dumfries House up in Ayrshire. So far,
we’ve taught more than 6,000 kids how to sew. They come for a day or they come
for a week and they learn how to sew with some brilliant people. We’ve also got
a sewing school at Trinity Buoy Wharf in east London and now we have a school
in the King’s home at Highgrove in Gloucestershire. The King believes we should
all know how to fix our clothes and do these basic things so he set up a school
to teach people to do it.”
As the
crowds continue to teem up and down, Patrick’s words of optimism regarding the
future health of the Row sound well founded. “Savile Row is unique because
everyone understands that what we do here is incredibly special. People are
prepared to pay for the skill of those who are making your suit,” he says.
“Everyone who is a customer on Savile Row appreciates what that is worth – it
is the skill of the human beings who crafted that suit, the skill of the
weavers who have created that cloth, and the finishers and the spinners, and
the famers who have raised the sheep or have grown the cotton. All of that
stuff we need to value in a very different way. We’re lucky on Savile Row
because people already do value it but we need to learn to have that same
respect for craftsmanship and materials in everything we buy and ensure that
Savile Row remains the absolute pinnacle of hand tailoring anywhere on the
planet.”
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