Meet Matthew
Gonzalez. The only American on Savile Row.
https://www.matthewgonzalez.co.uk/our-story
Matthew
Gonzalez is a Savile Row trained tailor who founded his eponymous bespoke house
in 2020 after working with some of the worlds most renowned tailoring firms.
Being the only American pattern cutter in an otherwise traditionally British
industry, Matthew’s house style is a unique blend of mid century American
menswear with the highest level of British bespoke craftsmanship.
Matthew was
born and raised in Long Beach California, a city who’s sartorial style is far
more relaxed than the storied streets of London’s Mayfair & St. James’s. He
moved to London in 2007 to pursue a degree in Bespoke Tailoring from London
College of Fashion. Shortly after his course work commenced Matthew began an
apprenticeship with the head cutter of Thom Sweeney. After seven and a half
years of training and cutting at Sweeney he decided to explore different
avenues of tailoring and design.
In 2015
Matthew began a Masters Degree at the University of Oxford in the History of
Design and in 2016 he undertook a pattern cutting role with Alfred Dunhill’s
bespoke tailor team looking after their Japanese trunk shows. Oxford provided
him with an opportunity to think critically about design choices and their
meanings while his experience representing
Dunhill in Tokyo further enriched his skills as a bespoke tailor.
After a year
of working with Dunhill, Matthew was approached by Huntsman, one of the most
renowned names in the industry, with an offer to cut on Savile Row for the
first time in his career. He spent four years constantly aiming to perfect his
craft when he decided it was finally the right time to create his self named
tailoring firm.
This house
is a reflection of Matthew’s personal life experiences. His unique background
of growing up in a west coast American beach community, his training in some of
the world’s most prestigious tailoring firms and his academic research at
Oxford have collectively shaped his signature silhouette, which rids itself of
unnecessary rigidity while maintaining a sense to timeless elegance.
ANGLO-AMERICAN
TAILORING
Our House
Style
We
collaborate with each client on every commission. It is our role to understand
your lifestyle so we can best advise on cloth selection and design details.
While we can cut any style of your choosing our quintessential house silhouette
is a blend of mid-century American menswear with traditional Savile Row
elements & techniques which we refer to as Anglo-American tailoring. The
cut can best be described as fitted with out being tight, a natural shoulder
line, with a structured chest but using lighter weight canvases. Many of the
suits we make are Single Breasted with a 3 Roll 2 button configuration.
Meet the Only American Tailor in London’s Most Storied Bespoke District
Just a few
blocks from Savile Row, a young Californian named Matthew Gonzalez is turning
out Ivy League sack suits and Western denim shirts using the finest British
craftsmanship.
By Alex Freeling
July 18, 2023
https://www.gq.com/story/matthew-gonzalez-tailor-profile
London’s Savile Row is arguably the most famous destination
in all of tailoring. More than a retail address, the Mayfair street is the
spiritual center of bespoke suiting, home to century-old outfitters like
Huntsman—which once counted King George V and Ronald Reagan among its
clients—and Anderson & Sheppard, inventor of the English drape cut and a
favorite of Fred Astaire and Fran Leibowitz. The Row and its most storied
occupants represent tradition, heritage, the pinnacle of British style. But just
a few blocks away, an American revolution of sorts is quietly taking shape.
In Princes Arcade, one of London's historic covered shopping
streets, a 37-year-old bespoke tailor named Matthew Gonzalez is readying his
new permanent digs. Gonzalez—bearded, bespectacled, always immaculately dressed
in worsted-wool suits and gun-club check tweed jackets—doesn’t fit the typical
description of a London haberdasher. For starters: He’s originally from Long
Beach, California. And there’s the small matter of his surname.
“Being an American in a very British industry, there’s a
tension with my last name,” Gonzalez says. “Sometimes people told me the name
Gonzalez might hinder potential clients. It’s not that I’ve been looked down
upon, but there’s an idea for consumers of pure British tailoring. It’s
important to normalize a Mexican or Hispanic name within what is normally seen
as a white, British, male industry.”
That tension is ever-present in the clothing Gonzalez makes
too. Despite training as a tailor in the UK for over a decade, Gonzalez has
developed a decidedly American house style. His soft-shouldered jackets nod to
the midcentury Ivy League aesthetic, as do his button-down shirts and knit
ties. He offers Southern-style seersucker in the summer and Western-style denim
shirts all year long. It’s not about disrupting the bespoke tradition, Gonzalez
says, but showing the range it can accomplish.
How did Gonzalez land in London in the first place? In the
early 2000s, he enrolled at Orange Coast College, a small school in Costa Mesa,
California, with the aim of eventually becoming an architect. Instead, an intro
to sewing class got him hooked on the idea of making his own suits—even though
his school’s fashion program was aimed at a slightly more casual demographic.
“It was designed to send students to the active sportswear industry,” Gonzalez
recalls. “Wet suits, board shorts, bags for surf shops.”
After graduation, he took a job at Nordstrom as an
alterations tailor, before eventually making the leap to the London College of
Fashion and enrolling in its then-new bespoke tailoring program. “The tailoring
class was small and surrounded by fashion,” Gonzalez says. “We were constantly
pushed to be more creative in our approach.”
After completing his degree at LCF, Gonzalez was taken on as
an undercutter at Thom Sweeney. He spent eight years there honing his craft
before moving on to Dunhill and then Huntsman, where he achieved a longtime
goal of working on the Row as a pattern cutter. “I developed a silly technique
to help guys relax at Huntsman,” he remembers. “Oftentimes we’d offer water,
tea, coffee, and I’d get into the fitting, fit the trouser, and as soon as I
put the jacket on the client would stand straight like a soldier on parade. I’d
say, ‘Why don’t you get a drink? Your coffee is getting cold.’ They’d reach for
it and immediately relax and allow the jacket to hang the way it should.”
But it was another stint in academia—pursuing a master’s
degree in the history of design at Oxford during his stints at Dunhill and
Huntsman—that crystallized Gonzalez’s desire to start his own business. “It
gave me a really wonderful insight into a slice of British culture that
overlaps very neatly with bespoke tailoring, and it also allowed me to think
outside of a very narrow lane of tailoring. It made me start thinking about why
we dress the way we do,” Gonzalez says. “That allowed me to start thinking critically
about what a brand is.”
For Gonzalez, figuring out his brand meant establishing a
house silhouette. Rather than the classic English business suit (strong and
structured, with multiple layers of canvas and padding) or the Neapolitan
leisure suit (shorter, slimmer, no padding to speak of), Gonzalez drew most
from the so-called “sack” suits of midcentury America. His jackets are cut
square and without darts, featuring soft shoulders, straight pockets, side
vents, and a three-roll-two closure—a classic American technique of cutting a three-button
jacket so that the lapel rolls over the third button. The result is elegant and
yet relaxed; formal but not stiff.
“It’s very American,” Gonzalez says of his house style,
“because it takes away any kind of flourish. It avoids extremely slanted
pockets. I want to strip back all those flourishes into a very simple design.”
And while his style takes plenty of cues from traditional
Ivy style, Gonzalez isn’t trying to perfectly replicate the clothes from any
one time period. “I don’t want to know exactly how long the coats were in the
’60s in Princeton,” he jokes. “The buttons aren’t the same, the cloth isn’t the
same. I want to look at reference images and look at the proportions and try to
make something evocative of that for the contemporary man.”
Gonzalez’s ultimate ambition is to give his British clients
a taste of true American style, and give his American clients (whom he’ll soon
be courting through a series of US trunk shows) the quality of Savile Row
bespoke in more familiar forms. Above all else, though, he wants to craft
clothes that make his customers feel supremely confident. “It’s about dressing
for your environment with aesthetic proportion and comfort,” he says, “wanting
to look good for yourself rather than wanting others to recognize you for how
well you dress.”
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