The Coat Route

by Meg Lukens Noonan

  The walls are covered with ornate frames holding warrants, yellowed with time, certifying that Poole was an official supplier to an international cast of royals, from Emperor Napoleon III to the Maharaja of Cooch Behar. Near the door, a small frame holds a canceled check written out to “Mr. Poole” and signed by Charles Dickens, who died in 1870, still owing the tailor money. Below that is a classic photograph of Winston Churchill wearing a bow tie, a black jacket, and striped pants. Henry Poole made formalwear for Churchill and many other dignitaries. In fact, as Angus Cundey is scheduled to explain, according to my Savile Row Field Day program, it was Henry Poole who invented the tuxedo.

  “In 1865,” Cundey says to a group that has gathered around him, “the Prince of Wales was quite fed up with changing every night into a dress coat. He wanted something more informal to wear at Sandringham, the royal family’s country estate.”

  Henry Poole made the prince a short velvet smoking jacket that was, at the time, so daringly casual that it could be worn only within the confines of the country place.

  “When a couple from Tuxedo Park, New York—a James and Cora Brown-Potter—was invited in 1886 to spend the weekend at the estate, Mr. Potter inquired what might be appropriate wear. It was suggested he get Henry Poole to make him a dinner jacket like the prince’s. So that’s what he did. After his visit, Mr. Potter went back to America with the jacket—but without his wife. She stayed behind in England to become an actress. The mind boggles.” Cundey pauses for his small audience to contemplate whether the garment was a fair trade for Mrs. Brown-Potter. “At any rate, when Mr. Potter wore his new short dinner jacket back in New York, the Tuxedo Club members and others who saw it were quite taken with it and started ordering their own. Hence the name.”

  From Henry Poole, I head down the street to Huntsman, at 11 Savile Row. Leaning against a black-scrolled wrought-iron fence is the firm’s red Pashley courier bike, with a wicker hamper large enough to hold a new suit; it’s still used to make local deliveries. Inside, Peter Smith, the general manager, a large man with floppy brown bangs, is standing near a well-broken-in leather couch set across from a marble fireplace. Two large stag heads, in full antler, are mounted on the wall on either side of the mantel. The room feels like a cross between a private shooting lodge and the lobby of a Nottingham bank. I ask Smith about the heads.

  “Ah, yes … well,” he says, looking delighted to have virgin ears for a story he must have told a thousand times. “In 1921, a customer came in and asked if we could hold on to them while he went to lunch. And he never came back.” After six months of waiting, the tailor hung the stag heads on the wall.

  It was serendipity for the shop, which by then was well established among royals and the tweedy hunt set as the place to get one’s riding garb. Fittings for pinks (scarlet equestrian coats) and patented seamless breeches were done in the back room astride a saddled wooden horse. Huntsman also became known for its use of bold plaid tweeds, woven exclusively for the firm in an ancient mill on Scotland’s Isle of Islay, and for its distinctive house style—one-button, sharp-shouldered, with a sculpted waist—borrowed from equestrianwear.

  Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Gregory Peck, and Rex Harrison were all fans of the distinct cut. In the 1980s, Wall Street traders discovered that the Huntsman silhouette set off their yellow power ties nicely—and didn’t mind one bit that the firm was the most expensive tailor on Savile Row. (Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, was a Huntsman guy.) When Ridley Scott was making Body of Lies, he went looking for a wardrobe for the character of the debonair Jordanian intelligence chief played by Mark Strong. Huntsman showed him a cache of mid-1990s-era suits ordered and paid for by an Arab billionaire, who had died before he could pick them up. They were perfect.

  I head back out on the street, where the tweed-clad shepherds are still urging their sheep up and down the corrals. My next stop is Gieves (that’s a hard G, please) & Hawkes, where, according to the Field Day program, a workshop tour is about to begin. The large store, which occupies the corner white Georgian town house at 1 Savile Row—once the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society—is the result of the merger of two successful tailors: Thomas Hawkes, a cap maker who opened for business in 1771, and James Gieve, who took over a Portsmouth naval outfitter in 1852. Each made his mark with military and expedition garb, and each had a gift for innovation. Gieves, Ltd. patented the Life Saving Waist Coat, which featured a built-in inflatable device and a pocket for brandy, sagely presuming that one would require a drink if one found oneself in the drink. Hawkes & Co. invented the solar topee, a cork-lined pith helmet that became de rigueur Great White Hunter headgear. Henry Morton Stanley was sporting one when he discovered Dr. David Livingstone in Ugogo, Africa.

  Andrew Goldberg, Gieves & Hawkes’s shiny-bald general manager, is gathering people for the tour. We follow him into the high-ceilinged atrium that had been the Royal Geographical Society’s map room and now houses the company’s ready-to-wear collection, and then through smaller rooms where pieces from the tailor’s archives are on display. There are gold-braid-trimmed Rear Admiral dress coats, RAF tunics, swan-feather-topped helmets, ostrich-plumed busbies, and Captain Bligh–style bicorne hats (Bligh himself was a customer). Glass cases display swords and aviator caps and dog-eared guides intended to help naval officers determine which of their dozen uniforms they should wear when. Among their choices: ball dress, ceremonial-blue undress, mess dress, and tropical mess undress—which, frankly, sounds like the most fun.

  Goldberg leads the group single file down a narrow flight of stairs to the workroom, which is bright with natural light from a large window below street level. People on the sidewalk can peer down into the shop to see a dozen tailors at worktables cutting, sewing, and pressing.

  “We have one individual concentrating on one aspect of each garment,” Goldberg says. “The buttonhole makers make buttonholes. Waistcoat makers sew waistcoats. We have tailors down here who have made garments for the same person for thirty years and have never laid eyes on him.”

  The tailors don’t need to see the customer, because, as in all bespoke establishments, he has been translated into two dimensions via measurements taken upstairs and transferred to paper patterns. Along one wall, I see hundreds of the brown-paper templates hanging from racks, at the ready for the day their owner comes back for a new suit or an overcoat. On each pattern, names are scrawled in black marker. The one closest to me reads “HRH Queen of Tonga.” I’m no expert, but even I can see that the queen’s pattern implies some serious girth.

  Gieves & Hawkes has dressed hundreds of other royals, including King George III and even the King of Pop. Michael Jackson’s iconic gold-trimmed military jackets were sewn in this workroom. But most people who have clothes made here—or at the other bespoke tailors’—are not royalty. They are regular men (and some women)—maybe a little paunchy, maybe a little round in the shoulder—who are willing to pay almost any price in order to feel good in their clothes.

  “It’s really not about the money,” Goldberg says. “Money is the trigger mechanism. What they are interested in is getting a suit that fits properly.”

  I leave Gieves & Hawkes, on my way to Anderson & Sheppard, a tailoring firm that had been a fixture on Savile Row for nearly a century until 2005, when rising rents forced it to relocate to a smaller space on Old Burlington Street, one block away. As I cross the Row and pass the sheep enclosures, I smell warm hay and lanolin, and then, just before rounding the corner onto Burlington Gardens, I smell something else. It is a familiar, if hard-to-identify, scent—rosewood, maybe, with undernotes of fir and Creamsicle. It triggers memories of being in crowded malls with my two teenage daughters—both giddy with the transformative promise of piqué cotton and distressed denim. Of course, I think, when I make the turn and see clusters of kids in hoodies checking their phones and holding shopping bags adorned with the black-and-white image of a chiseled naked male torso. It is the smell of Aber
crombie & Fitch.

  When Abercrombie & Fitch, the nineteenth-century American hunting-and-expedition outfitter turned purveyor of sexed-up teen casualwear, announced in 2005 that its first foray off North American soil would be in a nearly three-hundred-year-old mansion on the corner of Savile Row, there was a collective gasp from the longtime tenants of the neighborhood.

  “I admit to being horrified,” Henry Poole’s Angus Cundey told me.

  For a year and a half, as the building’s 18,000-square-foot interior was revamped to suit its new tenants, Cundey and his colleagues had to walk past a two-story construction wall plastered with the retailer’s signature Olympian pecs and abs. The former Queensberry House—later home to a branch of the Bank of England and then a Jil Sander boutique—was a tricky space. The bright lights and white walls of Sander’s minimalist showroom had to be scrapped, and the former bank vaults had to be converted into shadowy nooks for T-shirts and jeans. The walls along the grand staircase had to be hung with Mark Beard’s giant faux-vintage portraits of half-naked, well-muscled sportsmen, and the twenty-seven-foot-high ceilings, which would have reverbed the A&F house music into aural mud, had to be compensated for with 125 strategically placed speakers. Once the army of beautiful young sales help was hired and the moose heads were hung and the atomizers were primed to pump out Fierce Room Spray, the store’s signature vaporous catnip, the store was ready for its March 22, 2007, opening.

  Two hundred people stood in the cold rain that day, in a line that snaked down Savile Row. They could probably hear the driving techno beat as they waited their turn to walk through the stone-columned entranceway, past the two shirtless male greeters in faded low-slung jeans who flanked the door. Once they were inside, and had allowed their eyes to adjust to the cavelike darkness, they would be free to fill their arms with $100 polo shirts and $200 jeans. And, for a short time, they would feel that they had been granted membership in an exclusive club where teeth were straight and white, and bodies were toned and depilatoried into sculptural perfection.

  The eager customers came the next day, and the next, and the next. Lines for the dressing rooms were sometimes forty-five minutes long. Buoyed by its success in the U.K., Abercrombie, which had reached saturation point in the lackluster American market, would soon build stores in Paris, Madrid, Singapore, Brussels, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Hamburg, Munich, Düsseldorf, Hong Kong, and Milan.

  After the initial shock, the tailors of Savile Row tried to look for the upside. The store was certainly bringing new foot traffic to the area. Perhaps, one day, Abercrombie & Fitch customers would be ready to ditch their baggy jeans—and they would know where to go. After all, hadn’t Mike Jeffries, Abercrombie’s flip-flop-wearing CEO, come to Norton & Sons to be fitted for a bespoke suit?

  “People who are going to go into Abercrombie & Fitch aren’t going to come in to see us,” Barry Tulip, Gieves & Hawkes’s design director, told a British GQ reporter. “But we do want them to look into the window and say, ‘Crikey, that’s amazing! As soon as I’ve got rid of my hankering for Abercrombie, I’m going to grow up and come to Gieves.’ ”

  I make my way past the groups milling around outside Abercrombie & Fitch and round the corner to Anderson & Sheppard. Inside, a hushed front room glows with an amber light, as if viewed through a glass of sherry. The butternut walls, the parquet floors, the etchings of hounds, the half-shaded wall sconces illuminating the nougat-colored marble fireplace—they are all enough to make me want to lie down on the leather couch, put my feet up, and dive into a book about topiary or tea cozies. On tables near the large-paned front window, ledger books have been left open to pages with handwritten orders from Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Duke Ellington, and Fred Astaire—all devotees of Anderson & Sheppard’s easy, soft-shouldered suits.

  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 o
ften 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.