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.
“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 anyth
ing 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.
What is this strange animal who lives high above the clouds in a region where practically no other mammals can survive; this small creature who, inconsequential in stature and number, because of its almost priceless pelt, has been singled out from among the animals of the earth?
SYLVAN STROOCK
Jane 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.
The Coat Route Page 4