To Survive the Pandemic, Savile Row Cuts a
Bespoke Strategy
With formal events and travel canceled, the
tradition-bound tailors are gently embracing technology — and finding leverage
on their landlords.
By David
Segal
Nov. 15,
2020
LONDON —
One morning in early November, a tailor on Savile Row took the measurements of
a client 5,500 miles away with the help of a robot. The tailor, Dario Carnera,
sat on the second floor of Huntsman, one of the street’s most venerable houses,
and used the trackpad on his laptop to guide the robot around a client who
stood before mirrors in a clothing store in Seoul. Mr. Carnera was visible and
audible to the client through an iPad-like panel that doubled as the robot’s
face.
“I’m just
going to come a little bit forward,” said Mr. Carnera, moving the robot a few
feet to the left.
He was
collecting the roughly 20 measurements that are standard in a first Savile Row
fitting, the initial step in the fabrication of a made-from-scratch suit that
starts at about $8,000 and can reach as high as $40,000 for the priciest
material.
“Twenty
seven and a quarter,” said an assistant in Seoul, through a translator, holding
a measuring tape.
This
system, up and running since September, wouldn’t work without a pair of living,
trained hands on the client. As robots go, Huntsman’s is primitive —
essentially a camera and intercom on wheels. It doesn’t have arms, let alone
the fingertips to find an inseam. The point of the gizmo isn’t to eliminate the
need for the human touch. It’s to eliminate the need for Mr. Carnera to travel,
which, because of the pandemic, he can’t.
This
grounding is a fiasco for Savile Row tailors. They typically spend nearly as
much time flying around the world, fitting clients, as they do cutting and
sewing. For many houses, 70 percent of revenue comes from these overseas trunk
shows. With tailors stuck in their shops, and London tourism in free-fall, the
most famous men’s clothing street in the world is gasping for life.
“Our
company lived through the Boer War, World War I, the Depression, World War II,
recessions,” said Simon Cundey, the managing director of Henry Poole & Co.,
which traces its roots to 1819. “But through all of these crises, we could
visit our customers and they could visit us. This is a tragedy on a different
scale.”
The
struggles started before the pandemic. The decades-long drift from formal wear
has wounded a retail strip known for elegant, hand-sewn garments that take up
to 90 hours to produce. Plus, the cultural cachet of the suit has waned. All
Savile Row shops are associated with a Hollywood star who was a regular: Fred
Astaire at Anderson & Sheppard, Charlie Chaplin at Gieves & Hawkes.
Most died decades ago.
Covid has
turned the Row’s challenges into a brush with the abyss. Even dandies are now
trundling around their homes in Lululemon. The four months of business between
the first and second lockdowns helped, but not a lot. Profit-sapping quarantines
meant that tailors still could not fly to other European countries, Asia and
the United States, as they typically do three or four times a year.
American
Anglophiles are the street’s not-so-secret sugar daddies. New York, Los
Angeles, and a few other U.S. cities account for roughly one third of all
revenue on the Row, managing directors here say.
Fortunately,
the biggest landlord on the street has pockets deep enough to afford some rent
forbearance. Most of the Row is owned by one of the richest entities on earth:
Norway’s $1.1 trillion sovereign wealth fund. It owns a majority of the Pollen
Estate, a holder of prime acres of central London real estate for nearly 400
years.
The
overseers of the fund know that if the celebrated houses of Savile Row close or
scatter for cheaper premises, the street’s cachet will disappear, along with
much of its value. This gives tailors here a rare kind of leverage. Which may
be one reason there’s a lot of we’re-in-this-together talk from Julian Stocks,
a Pollen Estate property director.
“The fund
family are actually very long-term thinkers,” he said. “It’s not about that
slightly American approach of ‘make a quick buck and move on.’ It’s all about
sustainable growth and value over the long term.”
How long
this generosity will last is a major preoccupation for owners and employees
here. So is the broader question of whether the street can shake off its image
as a fusty redoubt of old-school haberdashery. Many of the nearly 30 shops are
attempting an update. Some are opening or expanding online shops that offer
ready-to-wear lines. Others are selling bespoke doctor’s scrubs and pandemic
masks. A few are experimenting with Zoom. So far, only Huntsman has built a
robot.
“I was
skeptical when I first heard the idea,” Mr. Carnera said. “I’m very
traditional. I work with a pair of shears that are about a hundred years old.
But the bottom line is that we had to do something.”
The
birthplace of the tuxedo
The “golden
mile of men’s tailoring” is actually just over 150 yards long. Starting in the
early 19th century, it was the unofficial couturier of the British Empire, the
place where England’s military leaders, equestrians, barristers and aristocrats
bought ceremonial finery for parades, hunts, dinners and coronations. Both the
tuxedo and the bowler hat were invented here, and when the suit emerged as the
uniform of capitalism, the street set the gold standard for craft and
durability. Its history and reputation are stellar enough that the name has
found its way into at least one language. The Japanese word for “business suit”
is sebiro. (Say it out loud.)
Suits made
here don’t simply fit in ways that feel uncanny. They are intended to perform
the sartorial version of plastic surgery, fixing imperfections like pigeon
chests, splayed feet, uneven arms, humpbacks and more. It’s a goal that can’t
be achieved through math alone. A fitting on Savile Row is a handsy tango that
lasts anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, and there are three fittings in all.
As tailors measure, they take notes, mental or otherwise, on physical quirks
that no tape could capture.
The ability
to meld numbers and observations is what is known in the trade as “Rock of
Eye.” For years, Rock of Eye was assumed to be possible only when tailor and
client were in the same room. Now, in the age of the coronavirus, Mr. Carnera
thinks otherwise.
“He’s got a
dropped left shoulder and a slight bow to his legs — quite erect posture,” he
said of the customer in Seoul when the fitting ended. “I can see all I need to
see.”
Other
tailors are dipping a tentative toe into the online world. Kathryn Sargent, the
first woman to rise to the title of master tailor, was recently cajoled into
her first Zoom fitting by a husband and wife in Manhattan who were tired of
waiting for their clothing.
“I was
reluctant because a fitting is quite intimate, and I didn’t know if I could
create that feeling on Zoom,” she said from her new shop on nearby Brook
Street. “But they told me, ‘Kathryn, you need to lower your standards.’”
Phoebe
Gormley, who co-owns the first bespoke, women-only shop on the Row, Gormley
& Gamble, won’t be conferring with her clients over the internet. The
degree of difficulty is too high.
“Men are
more straight up and down, with or without beer bellies,” she said. Instead,
she has sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of pandemic masks, some from
leftover shirt fabric, and, more ambitiously, is prepping a new, socially
distanced venture — an online store called Form Tailoring by Gormley &
Gamble.
“Completely
Covid-proof,” she said.
Richard
Anderson, owner of a shop that bears his name, stuck to an in-person approach
to sales in the months between lockdowns. He had designed a trio of casual
blazers, and one afternoon, before he had to close his doors again, he modeled
them in a mirror. They were identical in cut — one button, peak lapels,
slightly padded shoulders — and sold in wool, suede and leather. The leather
version was a shade of shiny, riotous red rarely seen on anything but fire
trucks or Michael Jackson.
“We’ll put
it in the window and it brings them in,” he said, eyeing himself in the
leather. “We’ve done something similar before. A peacoat in an orange billiard
cloth. No one bought it in the orange, but we put in the window and people
bought it in blue and green.”
Three out
of four Beatles
Set in the
upscale Mayfair neighborhood in Central London, Savile Row is a three-minute
walk from Regent Street, one of the busiest shopping boulevards in Europe.
Somehow it still feels separate and secluded, like a private club you might
miss unless someone pointed out the entrance. It’s a by-appointment destination
that doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic. Customers range from royals to
mobsters, plus plenty of financiers.
“I had this
one customer, young guy, whose father brought him in,” Mr. Carnera said. “He
insisted I make an inside pocket for his joints.”
Raised in
southeast London, Mr. Carnera skipped college to start an apprenticeship at
Anderson & Sheppard that lasted for three and a half years. During that
time, he worked solely on jackets, though his duties also included sweeping the
floor, making tea and enduring practical jokes, like being sent on errands to
buy button holes.
He later
learned the art of cutting patterns, which are made from pieces of brown paper
that provide the blueprint of every garment. Unlike made-to-measure clothing,
which starts with a jacket that a customer tries on and is then tweaked,
bespoke begins with the customer’s own contours. Every house on Savile Row
keeps its paper patterns, thousands of them, usually strung on a line. At a
glance they look like animal pelts.
“This one
is Gregory Peck’s,” said Mr. Carnera, after rummaging through a closet at the
rear of Huntsman where patterns are kept in chronological order.
Savile Row
is known for producing one-button jackets with roped shoulders that give men a
slightly squared off look, a vestige of the street’s military roots. Every
house, though, has its own aesthetic. Dege & Skinner cuts its trouser
narrowly and makes wider-than-usual lapels. Owners of a suit made by Huntsman —
jacket cut long and close to the chest, an equestrian silhouette — are said to
nod in recognition when they encounter each other.
Most of the
august, old houses are clustered on the “sunny side of the street,” namely the
east. Many of the buildings opposite were constructed after World War II.
Members of the Third Reich were once a source of income, but when the
hostilities began, the street wasn’t spared. A few of the many bombs dropped on
London during the Blitz landed on Savile Row.
Since then,
successive generations of tailors have trickled in, each offering a jolt of the
new. Like Edward Sexton, who showed up with his business partner, Tommy Nutter,
in 1969. At the time, most houses kept their storefronts partially covered with
drab fabric and speaking to the media was not cricket. If you had to ask what
was behind those decorous scrims, you were encouraged to just move along. Mr.
Sexton shocked the street by putting dazzling jackets in the window and
attracted rock star clients. Three of the Beatles on the cover of Abbey Road
are wearing suits he designed.
“Paul was the
most conservative,” Mr. Sexton said. “John was more quirky.”
He sat one
morning in late October in his newly opened store at 36 Savile Row, wearing an
aqua blue, three-piece suit that was about 20 decibels louder than his voice,
which registered just above a whisper. He’d worked for the last few decades out
of a studio in Knightsbridge, and sounded somewhat ambivalent about returning
to the street that launched him.
“It’s
asleep now, and not because of Covid,” he said. “When I was here earlier with
Tommy, it was really buzzing. There was an intelligence — the tailors spoke to
each other, and they spoke tailoring. Today, there’s no sense of the needle in
these places. They’re just showcases for brands.”
It doesn’t
help that five storefronts are now vacant, just enough to make the place seem
like it’s in distress. Pre-pandemic rents were high, demand for suits declined
and Brexit hurt, too.
“Things
were already starting to unravel before Brexit,” said Ozwald Boateng, one of a
handful of “new bespoke movement” tailors who opened shops in the 1990s and
early 2000s. “All of that international traffic that was coming through London,
well, it’s going somewhere else now.”
Tailors
with a “sense of the needle” aren’t necessarily in a hurry to open on Savile
Row. Ms. Sargent knows the street is her natural milieu, but she gets along
well with her current landlord on Brook Street and isn’t expecting a bargain if
she moves back to the place where she learned the craft.
“It’s
evolution, not revolution, on Savile Row,” she said. “It’s just been really
expensive, and I can’t take on the added costs now.”
Some
combination of high overhead and poor strategic choices have defeated some
boldfaced names in fashion here. Lanvin and Alexander McQueen opened stores on
the Row that have since closed. Pillars of the community have folded, too.
Kilgour, French & Stanbury, which made the suit Cary Grant wore in “North
by Northwest,” was acquired years ago by a Chinese investment company and closed
in March, citing “challenging trading conditions.” (A pop-up shop on the Row is
planned for December.) Hardy Amies,
which opened in 1945 and designed costumes for Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space
Odyssey” as well as frocks for Queen Elizabeth, closed last year.
The space
is now occupied by the flagship of Hackett, a company that is a relative
whippersnapper at 37 years old. It started elsewhere in London and has dozens
of stores around the United Kingdom and Europe.
In other
words, it has some trappings of a brand showcase.
Queen
Victoria’s Western Angolan trousers
Huntsman
seems an improbable site for high-tech innovation. The second floor has a bar,
a dart board and huge ancient ledgers with handwritten notes in elegant script.
They look like props for a film adaptation of a Dickens novel. Actually, they
are the in-house accounting books. There are entries for dukes, earls and many
pages devoted to Queen Victoria, whose purchases included “2 Striped waistcoats
with sleeves” and “5 pairs Western Angolan trousers.”
The robot
idea sprang from the ever-churning mind of Pierre Lagrange, a long-haired
58-year-old Belgian hedge fund manager who acquired the company in 2013. Part
nerd, part swashbuckling capitalist, Mr. Lagrange rides a Harley and exults
during an interview about the pink, wide-wale corduroy jacket he owns.
(“Everybody says it’s amazing.”) He’s been pushing Huntsman to expand its
audience and offerings, bolstering its website and opening a Huntsman satellite
in a Manhattan apartment that once belonged to Tony Bennett.
When Covid
shut down retail in March, he brainstormed with a manager and started thinking
about physicians who perform remote-controlled surgery. If a robot can work on
a kidney, he figured, why not a suit?
“I’ve
always been a proponent of using tech in ways that let people focus on what
they’re really good at,” he said, “whether that’s a hedge fund or in
tailoring.”
The company
had six robots built and christened all of them “Mr. Hammick,” a tribute to
Colin Hammick, Huntsman’s much-revered and now-deceased head tailor. Five Mr.
Hammicks are now in the United States and Asia. They are assembled in places
convenient to customers, like their homes, by employees who live in the same
country.
To date,
the Hammick brigade has yet to produce a finished suit. But even before that
proof-of-concept moment arrives, Mr. Lagrange is optimistic. Suits made on the
Row for overseas customers take about a year from start to finish, largely
because all three fittings require a visit, and those are spaced a few months
apart. By relying on Mr. Hammick instead of planes, the whole process will take
five months.
“I don’t
know how fast we would have gotten here without Covid,” said Mr. Lagrange, of
the machines. “Sometimes you need a crisis.”
Some
traditionalists here will be put off by what the mother of invention has
wrought at Huntsman. Then there’s Mr. Stocks, the agent of the Pollen Estate,
who is a fan of any innovation that adds vitality to the Row and keeps its
character intact.
“Let’s face
it, 10 years ago we’d be sitting here in suits,” he said, after settling into a
chair in the spacious tearoom in the rear of J.P. Hackett, where we met for a
pre-lockdown interview. “But the world’s moved on and we need to make sure that
Savile Row moves with it. Because if you don’t, you’re dead.”
A few years
ago, Pollen hired a PR firm for the Row. It has also pushed for improvements to
the streetscape. The current priority is keeping tenants afloat. Many did not
pay rent during the first lockdown and the estate is now speaking to all
tailors about further support during lockdown number two. During the four
months stores were open in the summer and fall, discounted rents were paid, and
some paid no rent at all.
Plenty of
managing directors here give the estate high marks for the way it has dealt
with them during the pandemic and for the tenor of negotiations about rents in
the near future. Others are less impressed. Life on the Row, they say, has been
far too expensive for too long.
“My
understanding is that they are now willing to talk and find solutions,” said
Mr. Boateng of the Pollen Estate. “That’s good to hear, but given the number of
empty stores here, the survival of the street is at stake. Some real, radical
rethinking of approach is needed.”
The estate
has extra motivation to keep mainstay tenants in situ. With historic
preservation in mind, the local government imposed a singular restriction on
some properties on the Row: If a space has been zoned for in-store tailoring,
it can be rented only to shops with in-store tailors. Pollen couldn’t fill a
vacancy with a Zara or a Topshop if it were so inclined.
Which it is
not. Mr. Stocks acknowledges that this tailors-only policy hands tactical
advantage to some tenants. But it also prevents the five other landlords that
own properties on the Row from letting to chain stores that would make the
place generic.
This is not
merely a hypothetical. Eight years ago, Abercrombie & Fitch opened a kid’s
store in an unrestricted retail space. This was especially appalling to many
because the building had once been home to Apple Corps, the Beatles’ multimedia
company. In 1969, when the band couldn’t figure out where to play the show that
became its last, instruments were hauled upstairs and the group played on the
roof.
Before
Abercrombie opened its doors, a group of dapper protesters, organized by a
magazine called The Chap, gathered outside the space holding placards that read,
in a nod to John Lennon, “Give Three Piece a Chance.” The store opened anyway
and has since closed.
‘The
algorithms got me!’
Mr. Stocks
is engineering more palatable additions. A bespoke shoemaker, Gaziano &
Girling, moved in last year. A coffee shop called the Service opened in July,
the first of its kind here. A made-to-measure shop for women, the Deck, debuted
last moth.
“And we’d
like to add the best leather goods, the best shirts, a watchmaker, male
grooming,” he went on. “Make it a sort of bastion of men’s luxury — which it
always has been, but in a broader, 21st-century sense.”
All of the
Pollen Estate’s space on Savile Row is spoken for, so newcomers will move into
the estate’s holdings nearby, on Old Burlington Street and Clifford Street. As
it happens, one of Mr. Stocks’ newest tenants opened there in September, and he
was eager to show it off.
Thom Sweeney,
as the store is called, is a four-story townhouse with a spiffy new barbershop
in the basement and two floors of clothing. The top floor has a full bar,
leather sofas, a hearth filled with lit candles and a television playing a Sean
Connery-era James Bond film.
To Mr.
Stocks, this is the new model of hip, immersive retail — one he’d like shoppers
to include in their image of Savile Row. The owners of Thom Sweeney, on the
other hand, are happy to have a good 20 yards between them and the more famous
street.
“We didn’t
look at it,” said one of the owners, Thom Whiddett, about Savile Row. “We
wouldn’t fit in there. The street has amazing tailors, but we didn’t want to
pigeonhole ourselves.”
The idea
was to open near enough to the Row to benefit from its prestige without getting
saddled with its drawbacks. A number of tailors, on and off the street, lament
the intimidation factor that keeps customers away. James Sleater of the nervily
named Cad and the Dandy on Savile Row likened shopping on the street to
beckoning a sommelier at a Michelin-starred restaurant. It could end up costing
you so much you might not be inclined to do it. In a break with tradition, Cad
puts prices on its website.
“Even if
you can afford an Aston Martin,” Mr. Sleater said, “you want to know how much
it’s going to cost you.”
Cad’s
fondness for reinvention extends to online fittings. They have gone well enough
for Mr. Sleater to call them “another string to our bow.”
Across the
street, Ozwald Boateng sat in the office in his store and talked about lining
up his first Zoom consultation. The prospect irked him. Last year, he unveiled
his debut collection for women in a show at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, which he
titled A.I. The name was a feint. The initials stood for “authentic identity.”
“I was
really fed up with algorithms running our lives,” he said. “So I flipped the
meaning. I was trying to say, ‘Keep your truth, keep your identity.’”
Eight
months into the pandemic he’s realized that, like it or not, technology is the
only end run for Covid-19 — and perhaps the only way his company can survive.
“The
algorithms got me!” he said, laughing, with a hint of resignation. “Even here,
the digital world has won.”
David Segal
is a Business section reporter based in London. @DSegalNYTimes
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