The Coat Route (6 page)

“
Mass luxury is not luxury at all, because anyone can buy it; it’s available everywhere and produced in enormous quantities. Real luxury is about scarcity,” Patrick Grant, the director of Norton & Sons, a Savile Row tailoring firm, said in an interview in the
South China Morning Post
.

Even in China, where luxury products are a relatively new concept, discerning shoppers were starting to turn away from labels in search of personalized goods and services with a compelling story behind them—preferably one that was told in a posh British accent. In a fever of Anglophilia, the Chinese were embracing anything that conveyed good breeding and connoisseurship, including polo (which had last been popular in China about seven hundred years ago), cricket, golf, croquet, scotch whiskey, Jaguar automobiles, Victorian oak sideboards, boarding schools—and bespoke.

And they were descending on the U.K. and Europe to shop.
In 2010, the London Luxury Quarter, a consortium of three hundred high-end shops in the West End, including Savile Row, reported that Chinese tourists were spending almost $1,000 whenever they made a purchase—up 155 percent from the previous year. Increasingly sophisticated and knowledgeable Chinese shoppers poured about $470 million into the U.K. economy that year, ten times more than they spent in 2007. Visa applications by Chinese rose by 40 percent—and were expected to surge if, as retailers urged, the government simplified the ten-page application. Harrods and Selfridges both saw double-digit increases in sales to Chinese tourists when they began accepting UnionPay, the Chinese credit card, and added a Mandarin-speaking sales staff. Burberry, the British fashion house, reported that, in 2010, 30 percent of sales in its U.K. stores were to Chinese customers. A company called London Luxury introduced private-car shopping tours to bespoke tailors led by a Mandarin-speaking guide. For an extra $425, customers could go down into the basement to watch the tailors at work. Hilton Hotels launched a Chinese welcome service in four London hotels, providing Chinese-speaking staff, traditional Chinese breakfast food, and in-room Chinese TV, tea, and slippers.
Global Blue, a retail-market-research firm, found in a study of Chinese tourists who had come to Europe to shop that many of them were unhappy that they had been unable to spend all their money in the time they had available.

The Chinese were going on another kind of buying spree in the U.K. By 2012, Chinese companies would own Aquascutum, Gieves & Hawkes, MG Rover, the Birmingham City Football Club, and Weetabix, the quintessentially British breakfast cereal.

Savile Row tailors didn’t like much of what was happening around them, but they did find reasons to be optimistic. A year after my first visit, in 2010, two hundred students went through
the pre-apprenticeship course at Newham College; thirty of the best were working alongside master tailors as official Savile Row Bespoke Association trainees. There was also a surge in the popularity of trunk shows, in which tailors traveled to the United States and beyond to hold fittings in hotels. Tailors reported that their customers were getting younger—and they were arriving full of knowledge and opinions derived from studying websites and watching episodes of
Mad Men
.

Meanwhile, higher labor, materials, and freight costs in Asia, coupled with a general backlash against outsourcing, was spurring a renewed interest in closer-to-home manufacturing and locally sourced raw materials, both in Great Britain and in the United States.

Prince William married Kate Middleton, and in so doing shined a light on the sartorial traditions of Old England. (Among the viewing audience were an estimated thirty million Chinese.) Savile Row tailors reported a rush of orders from men who made the guest list. Business on Savile Row grew by 10 percent, even as the world’s economy faltered. Wool prices in Australia rose to record highs. And the venerable Gieves & Hawkes undertook a major renovation to transform itself into a men’s emporium, showcasing several niche businesses under its roof.

Among the shops-within-the-shop were a branch of Bentley’s, a London dealer in vintage steamer trunks and 1920s cocktail shakers; a salon called Gentlemen’s Tonic, which specializes in classic wet shaves; Carréducker, a hip husband-and-wife team of custom shoemakers who could be seen working in a glass booth surrounded by hand-shaped lasts; and a shoe-shine station operated by a young man named Justin FitzPatrick, an expert in military-grade polishing and a well-known blogger among footwear fanatics called the Shoe Snob. Gieves & Hawkes set out to
be more than a store. It wanted to be an experience, as alluring to a certain kind of man as its upstart American neighbor, Abercrombie & Fitch, was to its younger and scruffier, but no less loyal, clientele.

I leave Anderson & Sheppard, pass by Abercrombie & Fitch again, and arrive back on Savile Row, in front of the sheep trailer, where there are a dozen or so people with champagne flutes in their hands. A young security guard in a waxed-cotton field jacket and Wellington boots shifts his weight from one leg to the other, his vigilance apparently on the wane. Behind the split-rail fence, the poker-faced sheep are chewing on hay.

Most of the street is in shadow, but the late-afternoon sun has lit up the white façade of Gieves & Hawkes and illuminated the small-leafed ivy curling out of planters and around the black iron rods of the fence, the navy window awning with the forthright white lettering, the arched entranceway over the black wooden double doors, and, above them, the Union Jack, moving a little in a weak breeze. I walk down the west side of the street, past Ben Sherman and Lanvin, to Ozwald Boateng, the large shop at the corner of Savile Row and Clifford, in the space once occupied by Anderson & Sheppard. I peer through the windows into the gallery-like store. Along one wall there is floor-to-ceiling shelving, painted a glossy black, and in each lighted opening there are men’s shirts, folded flat and arranged by intensity of color—celery to fern, sky to indigo, petal to poppy. In the shop window, I catch a reflection of myself. My sweater, which I had thought fashionably oversized, is, I see now, overwhelming. My slim pants have gone baggy at the knee.

I decide to do one more lap of Savile Row, before the sheep are loaded back into their trailers, before the old Victorian doors are locked, before the street returns to what it was yesterday and
what it will be tomorrow. I stop first in a small exhibit barn, erected for Field Day, where tables hold the lovely, simple equation of wool—raw fleece, skeins of twisted yarn, bolts of cloth. Then I’m in front of Huntsman again, looking down over its wrought-iron fence to the basement workroom. Two tailors, older gentlemen with bald heads, are sitting near the big front window, which, even though it is below street level, lets in plenty of light. One, in a lavender shirt, has a garment in front of him on a worktable, and the other, in a dark vest and a white shirt, has his project on his lap. Their heads are bent, and for a moment each has his right hand poised at the top of the stitch, like conductors about to cue the orchestra.

On the sidewalk, a young man with a trimmed brown beard and tortoiseshell glasses is striding toward me. He is wearing what I am almost certain is a bespoke suit. It is a bold gray-and-black Prince of Wales check, and he has paired it with a maroon-and-white pinstriped shirt and a dark silk tie. On his feet are black brogues, polished to an obsidian sheen. I realize that I am envious of this man in his beautiful suit, of all the men in their suits.

I’m envious of the excitement they must have felt when they walked into their tailor of choice, knowing they would be placing an order. I’m envious of the time they spent paging through books of cloth, weighing the merits of this nubby gray or that rich navy. I’m envious of the thrill they must have felt when their tailor held their new jacket behind them and they reached back and slipped their arms into the sleeves and felt it settle onto their shoulders, perfectly flush to their neck. And I’m envious of the moment, that delicious moment, when they fastened the buttons for the first time, gave the lapels a sharp little tug and saw, yes, that it fit, just right.

A
few days after his first consultation about the coat, Keith Lambert returned to John Cutler’s shop to discuss fabrics. The tailor was not surprised to hear his client say that he was thinking cashmere—Keith always wanted the very best. John showed him books of swatches—in the tailoring trade they’re known as “bunches”—and Keith rubbed the small squares of sample cloth between his fingers. Then John had a thought. He hesitated. Perhaps …

“We could do cashmere, Keith,” he finally said. “Or we could take it a step further.…”

John got up and walked into a back room. A few minutes later, he reappeared holding a long, narrow mint-green cardboard box, embossed on top with a gold coat of arms and the words “Dormeuil. The World’s Best Cloths.” John placed the box on the table in front of Keith, then lifted the lid and took out a bolt of folded dark-blue cloth. He laid the fabric across his client’s lap
.

“Feel that,” he said
.

Keith touched the edge of the material, then ran his hand along the length of it. John knew just what he was feeling. The cloth was unimaginably soft—softer than the finest cashmere, but with more substance and spring—and it had a short, distinct nap that begged to be stroked
.

“That’s lovely,” Keith said. “What is it?”

“Vicuña,” John said, almost whispering the word. “Very rare. From Peru.”

John watched Keith caress the fabric and study the play of light and shadow in its shallow folds. For twenty years, the tailor had been holding on to this extraordinary and, at $6,000 a yard, staggeringly expensive cloth, waiting for the right client. Yes. He could see it now in Keith’s face. He had found him
.

J
ane Wheeler hates winter in Lima. From May to November, a dense, cool ocean fog, known as the
garua
, enshrouds the sprawling Peruvian city of nine million in a depressing, damp all-day dusk.

“Another beautiful day,” the owlish sixty-seven-year-old scientist with cropped graying hair says from behind the wheel of her black pickup. It is a murky morning in late July 2010, and we are heading for her office at the University of San Marcos.

I had arrived in Lima after midnight and been driven to Jane’s home about twenty miles south of the city. From the back of the taxi, I had been aware of the fog, the way it softened the lights on the hills and fuzzed the headlights of oncoming trucks. It made the trip dreamlike and thrilling. I was in the land of the Incas, Pizarro’s City of Kings, heading down the Pan-American Highway on the ragged desert edge of South America. But in the
morning gloom, from the passenger side of Wheeler’s Toyota, I see that, for all its exoticism and glories, Lima is, above all, a place that cannot afford bad lighting.

The ash-gray towers of the Cementos Lima factory look like a haunted dust-bowl Oz. Shantytowns of woven reed, scrap tin, and cardboard cover the sand hills on the metropolis’s outskirts. In the city itself, grime seems spackled to every surface, from the crumbling adobe tenements to the decaying colonial mansions. And then there is the traffic: a junkyard honkfest of crowded buses, top-heavy trucks, and backfiring jalopies trailing black exhaust while slaloming around pedestrians, who are, literally and quite necessarily, running for their lives. I am not surprised to find out later that Lima has one of the highest rates of pedestrian fatalities in the world.

Jane has been making this commute for most of the past sixteen years. The Washington, D.C., native is an archaeozoologist—an analyzer of animal remains found at archaeological sites. She holds degrees from American University, Cambridge University, and the University of Michigan, and she did postdoctoral work at the University of Paris. Her field studies have taken her from Mexico to Scotland to Iran, but it was in Peru that she got famous—not Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall famous, but renowned in the international community of people who care about South American camelids: llamas, alpacas, guanacos, and, the reason I was here, vicuñas. Jane was going into the mountains to observe them in the next few days and had agreed to let me tag along.

A guard waves us through a security gate at the university, and Jane parks under a lone palm tree in front of her office building, a concrete bungalow that looks more like a restroom at a city park than like a world-class research center. Before walking through the office door, I read out loud, in fractured Spanish,
the words on a brass sign.
UNIDAD DE VIROLOGIA Y GENETICA MOLECULAR
.

“Except it’s not called that anymore,” Jane says, without further explanation. Inside, the office is divided in two: her veterinarian husband, Raul Rosadio, and several grad students on one side of a wall, Jane on the other. Besides being a university office and lab, this is also headquarters for CONOPA, a Peruvian nonprofit organization run by Jane and Raul that is dedicated to camelid research and conservation, and to improving the well-being of the herders who depend on the animals for survival.