The Coat Route (5 page)

Down a short hall is a bright sky-lit workroom, where John Hitchcock, the firm’s managing director and head cutter, creates what many consider to be the ultimate in bespoke menswear. Ralph Lauren and Tom Ford have both come to watch the trim, dapper tailor at work—and Ford had Hitchcock make him a suit. Alexander McQueen started his career here as a sixteen-year-old apprentice. Prince Charles, Graydon Carter, Fran Lebowitz, and Manolo Blahnik are just some of his more recent customers. I ask him how he feels about having Abercrombie & Fitch as neighbors.

“I popped in once. I thought I should see it,” he says. “It’s nice, really. Ask any young girl where Savile Row is and now they know. They wouldn’t have known a few years ago. They usually have a young man with no shirt on in the door. David and I keep our shirts on, don’t we, David?” he says with a laugh to David Walters, the firm’s head trimmer, who is on the other side of the room.

Abercrombie is, in many ways, the antithesis of Anderson & Sheppard and the other heritage tailors.

“All of their money is in marketing—merchandising, promotions, advertising, PR—and hardly any is in the product,” Anderson & Sheppard’s Anda Rowland told me. Rowland is the elegant strawberry-blond former Parfums Christian Dior executive who in 2005 inherited the tailoring business from her tycoon father, Tiny Rowland. “In our case, all of our money is in the product and very little in the marketing.”

For most old-school tailors, marketing has always been as alien as sweatpants. Business was built on word of mouth or inheritance; either someone in your club admired your coat and asked who had made it for you or your father took you to his tailor for your first suit and you were expected to mate for life. The closest the tailors came to self-promotion was with their display of framed royal warrants. Even garment labels were seen as being just a tad too show-offy. At Anderson & Sheppard, for example, labels are sewn inside inner pockets, where no one can see them—even if the coat happens to blow open in a gale.

“Those who know, know” is the Savile Row mantra. And there really was no need to shout: Anderson & Sheppard had all the work it could handle.

“
In actual fact,” Hitchcock said, when he appeared in a BBC documentary, “at one time, we had a problem—we had too much work and we took a salesman on to stop the customers from coming in.”

Things, however, were changing. Mass production of apparel, which gathered steam after World War I, continued its growth. A man who wanted a decent suit no longer had to pay a tailor a visit. The Old Guard was aghast. An article on the front page of a monthly leaflet produced by the cloth merchant Dormeuil in
1927 stated the objections succinctly: “He who wishes to be dressed, in the real meaning of the term, must have clothes designed and wrought for him. Nature made individuals; bespoke tailoring assists in retaining individuality. The choice is clear. One may live and die a man. Or, with personality destroyed, the epitaph shall read: He was born a man; he died a 36 regular.”

But there was no going back. As mass production ramped up, a shift in style also pulled men away from the sturdy English Cut (and Ivy style, its baggy American fraternity brother) to Italy’s new, slinky Continental Look, first made famous by the Romebased Brioni. A 1955
Life
magazine article called the appearance in American department stores of Brioni’s slim-cut styles “
a trap for men” aimed at “outmoding their wardrobes.”

Italy became even more dominant in the late seventies and eighties, when Giorgio Armani’s fluid, easy-to-toss-on, unstructured jackets were adopted by Hollywood’s chin-stubbled elite.
The Armani look also bridged “the gap between the anti-Establishment sixties and the money-gathering eighties. It made the wearer seem simultaneously more at ease and more powerful,” as Woody Hochswender observed in a 1990
New York Times
piece about the Italian icon. The Armani suit, he said, was just “right for a new generation of men slipping back into the office routine after a decade of countercultural copping out.”

From the informal ease of Armani, it wasn’t a huge leap to Casual Friday, which by the late nineties had created a generation of otherwise intelligent men who believed that dressing well meant putting on a clean pair of Dockers.
It didn’t help that the era’s tech tycoons were sartorial duds: Bill Gates was most often seen wearing what
GQ
called the “lazy preppy” look, while the late Steve Jobs made a uniform of Levi’s 501 jeans and black Issey
Miyake-designed mock turtlenecks. (Who could have predicted that they would look like Gordon Gekko compared with the world’s next digital mogul, Mark Zuckerberg—he of the ubiquitous hoodie?) Personal computers, meanwhile, made it possible to work at home, where there was no reason to ever get out of one’s pajamas, let alone put on a coat and tie.

Back in the West End, the tailors were further rattled by the arrival of two young fashion-forward, image-conscious upstarts—Richard James in 1992 and Ozwald Boateng in 1995. Both broke the unwritten codes of Row decorum by cultivating famous clients and seeking out publicity (James ran advertisements in glossy menswear magazines; Boateng staged a catwalk show of his ready-to-wear collection at Paris Fashion Week). Like Tommy Nutter before them, their interpretations of classic English tailoring were presented in jarring color palettes and quirky silhouettes. While the old schoolers were fretting about the young arrivals, they were also surveying their own workrooms and seeing a sea of gray hair. The few younger workers they did have were unlikely to stay more than a year or two. Most were more interested in being famous designers than in being anonymous “makers”—and were unwilling to put in the years it would take to become expert trouser or coat makers. As for the tailors, who could afford to pay a trainee that long, anyway?

Then there was the infuriating hijacking of the term “bespoke.” Tailors felt that it was
their
word, and suddenly it was popping up to describe everything from insurance to ice cream. Even worse were the retailers trying to muscle in on the Savile Row cachet by setting up shop in the neighborhood and advertising what they called “bespoke” garments, when what they were actually selling were clothes being made by machines in offshore
factories—and then shipped back to London. They weren’t necessarily terrible suits, but, the tailors claimed, they most definitely were not Savile Row bespoke.

They decided the time had come to fight back. Led by Mark Henderson, the deputy chairman of Gieves & Hawkes, a core group of tailors banded together in 2004 to form the Savile Row Bespoke Association. They also hired a PR firm—a remarkable step for people whose purpose had always been to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. They registered the trademark “Savile Row Bespoke” and created a label that set out to do for tailored garments what France’s terroir-designating
Appelation d’Origine Contrôlée
did for wine and cheese. To be worthy of the label, the garment had to meet the association’s strict criteria. Among other things, it would have to be from a shop that offered a choice of more than two thousand fabrics and had an expert cloth consultant on the premises. It also had to be produced with at least fifty hours of handwork and several fittings, made from scratch from an individual pattern created by a master cutter, and sewn by tailors who were based in England.

To address the skills gap and the aging of the tradesmen, the group launched an apprenticeship scheme designed to get young people to take up the tape measures and shears. They inaugurated a bespoke tailoring course in association with a local college, upon completion of which students could apply for an SRBA-funded apprenticeship on Savile Row. They also appealed to the local government to acknowledge Savile Row as a national treasure worthy of special zoning laws.

“We’re one hundred yards off Bond Street, which is the most expensive retail space in the world,” Henderson told me. “And we had working tailors in our basements. We had to figure out a way to stop development.” After a lengthy study, the Westminster
Council concluded that Savile Row should be designated a Special Policy area, which meant that workshop space would be protected for the use of tailors only.

An attempt to legally reclaim the word “bespoke” was less successful. A disgruntled customer brought a complaint to the British Advertising Standards Authority against a Swiss-owned company called Sartoriani, which had set up a small office and showroom in the basement at 10 Savile Row. Sartoriani advertised “bespoke” suits, “uniquely made according to your personal measurements and specifications”—at one-fourth the price of a suit from a traditional tailor. While customers were, in fact, having their measurements taken on Savile Row, the garments were being machine-cut and sewn in Germany. (Sartoriani never claimed otherwise.) Not fair, the complaint said—and certainly not “bespoke.” The ASA, however, sided with Sartoriani. To most people, it said, “bespoke” had simply come to mean “made for you.” It didn’t matter whether it was a $5,000 suit made by hand on Savile Row or a $400 suit made by a robot in China.

“You are looking at the difference between a fine painting and a print,” a disappointed Henderson told a reporter after the ruling.

The word “bespoke,” at the same time, was well on its way to becoming a buzzword used by all kinds of businesses. Suddenly, there were bespoke salad bars, bespoke investment groups, bespoke bicycles, bespoke walking tours, bespoke cupcakes, bespoke headphones, bespoke headboards, bespoke toilet seats—even something called Bespoke Hair Artisans, which managed to incorporate not one but two trendy words into its name when it opened its doors in Edina, Minnesota.
Looking at the popularity of the term, a May 2012
Wall Street Journal
article noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office listed thirty-nine active applications
and registrations that used the word “bespoke.” Perhaps some of the applicants had relied on consultants offering bespoke patent strategies.

True bespoke tailors were also struggling with the new phenomenon of “mass custom” production, which used technology, and cheap labor, to bring made-for-you suits to the masses. On Madison Avenue, a company called My Suit, owned by the South Korean conglomerate BK House, opened a flagship store and launched a website on which customers could design their own suit for less than $1,000. The company’s Mexican factory, capable of producing one million suits a year, could turn a made-to-measure order around in two weeks.

“
It’s like Build-A-Bear for grown men,” James Hancock, the vice president of sales, told
Women’s Wear Daily
.

Indochino.com
, launched by two Canadians in Vancouver, called itself the “fast fashion” option for custom menswear. Its suits are produced in a Shanghai factory, based on measurements that customers take themselves and submit online. There was no middleman and no storefront.

Of course, getting a decent fit assumes that the customer knows how to use a tape measure on himself—something that is not easy. New technology appeared that aimed to take the human error out of measurements. Body scanners, using technology borrowed from gaming and security-screening technology, popped up in traditional retailers like Brooks Brothers in Manhattan and at upstarts like Tailor Made London. The scanners could produce almost instant digital body maps.

Tailor Made’s website acknowledged that what it was peddling wasn’t equal to a Savile Row experience or product: “Nothing can surpass the touch, the look, or the feel of bespoke suits,
but who really has the time for ponderous measuring sessions and multiple fittings these days? It’s only a bespoke suit after all.”

Meanwhile, software developers were racing to perfect a system that would use personal computer cameras to create a body map in the privacy of one’s own home.

To make clear the distinctions between these cut-rate mass-custom producers and their own handmade goods, the tailors knew they had to do a much better job of telling their story. They launched websites, took on marketing consultants—even started blogging and tweeting. Their mission was to recast themselves as luxury brands and to distance themselves from the widely held belief that their industry, however charming, was dying.

It was their good fortune that the qualities that made them special—their devotion to craftsmanship, their use of sustainable materials, their focus on provenance, their ability to customize, their supply-chain traceability, their very
slowness
—had become selling points in the mid- and post-recession years for a wide variety of products. J. Crew posted videos of Italian leatherworkers making shoes for the American brand on its website and began identifying some of the mills that produced its fabrics for garments featured in its catalogs. Restoration Hardware raised prices and filled its catalog with handmade lamps and tables, accompanied by lush photo spreads of artisans pounding iron and shaping wood, betting on the appeal of craftsmanship. West Elm, another furniture retailer, teamed up with Etsy, a website for vendors of handmade and one-of-a-kind products. Patagonia introduced the Footprint Chronicles, which allows consumers to track the making of, say, a down jacket from a Hungarian duck to a Reno, Nevada, warehouse. Marks & Spencer, the London department store, announced a traceability project called String that would
track every item of clothing it sold from raw material to finished product.

At the same time, European luxury brands that were founded on craft, as most were, shifted their advertising focus to reflect their handmade pedigree. Gucci launched a traveling Artisan Corner, in which Florentine leatherworkers set up a small workshop in a Gucci store to assemble and finish handbags in front of spectators. A year later, Hermès would conduct a similar workshop tour, bringing a troupe of leatherworkers and silk screeners to select stores all over the world.

The global spread of luxury products, meanwhile, also spurred a desire for the custom-made and the one-of-a-kind. People with money to spend were searching for something special that would distinguish them from the increasingly ubiquitous luxury brands.