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SAVILE ROGUES: LONDON'S RAKISH TAILORS

Stuffy? Snobbish? Restrictive? No, sir—bespoke has changed. Michael Bywater meets five tailors who have loosened up ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2009

North of Oxford Street, in the heart of Fitzrovia, where Dylan Thomas once drank and sang, lies Windmill Street. Here the passer-by will see an oddly Parisian-looking shopfront, rose-red and decorated with gold flowers and curlicues. The legend, in gold script on the window, says “Jonathan Quearney: Tailor, Outfitter & Clothier”.

To a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, Windmill Street would be an unthinkable place to go for the sort of hand-tailoring London is famous for. Indeed, anywhere outside Savile Row would be unthinkable. That’s why the zenith, the apogee, the ne plus ultra of tailoring is, throughout the world, referred to as “Savile Row”. Because that is where it comes from: the Row.

But Quearney, as affable and as voluble as his Irish roots would lead you to expect, is a Savile Rogue: one of a relatively new breed of tailors who are faithful to the great traditions of English tailoring, without nominating themselves as a branch of the heritage industry. Old-established tailoring houses may adorn their interiors with stuffed stag’s heads and curious wooden horses on which a man can sit to check the fit of his breeches. The Rogues are having none of it. Edgier, more in tune with the spirit of the times, they cater for a younger, hipper clientele. If fashion is about advertising the “designer”, and the Row is about declaring one’s affiliation with a (partly imaginary) tradition, then the Savile Rogues are about bending the conventions while respecting the craft.

Quearney is passionate about craft. He trained with Thomas Mahon (the Prince of Wales’s tailor for over 20 years), who taught him a semi-freehand way of cutting which acknowledges the fact that the human body contains no angles, only curves. In common with all craft tailors, the engineering of a suit fascinates Quearney. A customer sees only the cloth and feels only the fit; a tailor knows that it is multiple layers of canvassing and padding that give the suit—and sometimes the customer—shape. “I like to make a soft canvas in the breast of the suit,” he says. “That’s where the stitching counts. I like large, loose stitching, rather than small and tight like Huntsman [H. Huntsman & Sons of Savile Row, famous for their slim silhouette and nip-waisted, one-button jackets]. But the big thing is colour. You have to show the customer how it works, how the grey has green or brown in it. Show them how to look into the colour, not just at the colour.”

It is not just his own craft that bewitches him. “When I was training I got to know other craftspeople, and now I’m working with a second-generation Northampton shoemaker.” Why? “Well…wear a pair of round-toe shoes with one of my suits and you’ll look like you have golf clubs on your feet.” He’s also working with the fabric-printer Daniel Heath on a range of ties, and Becky Hogg, an embroiderer, on a new accessory that he says he can’t tell anyone about yet.

That’s more than you would get from an old-style tailor. On the Row, you might have been able to buy a tie—if you were lucky. Accessories? No, sir.

Yet even the Row now has its own Rogue: Nick Hart of Spencer Hart, at number 36. Hart has been, in his own words, “obsessed” with clothes since he was 13. Far from the “gentlemanly” output of the Old Row, a Spencer Hart suit has—as Anne Widdecombe famously said of Michael Howard—something of the night about it. The closely constrained Hart look can only be described as sharp. Bearing the stamp of his time as head of menswear at the designer label Kenzo, Hart’s narrow lapels and dark cloth are indefinably cool—another word missing from the traditional vocabulary of the Row.

The shop is cool. Hart is cool. The music that he says inspires his clothes—Cab Calloway, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, a hint of the Rat Pack—is the very definition of cool. “It’s like music. You don’t go beyond the lines. Less is more.”

Clothes, for Hart, stand for things. “The ‘Spencer’ in Spencer Hart was a friend at school in the 1970s. Black guy. East London. I remember him in the playground, very sharply dressed, reading Keats. Amazing style, fantastic attitude…it was all about this guy making his own world. And my mother, she’d go to the 100 Club…You know those old photographs of Duke Ellington? Black and white. People come in and we’ll put the perfect white shirt on them, first thing. It’s a very narrow framework. I want the viewer not to be able quite to put their finger on why the person wearing my suit looks as sharp as he does. The suits might have a soft construction, but a sharp lapel. It’s a very disciplined look.”

None of which you’d hear from a traditional Savile Row tailor. Yet in an odd way Hart is in the tradition of Weston’s of Conduit Street—a few hundred yards north—which was beaten into shape by the father of the modern man’s suit, Beau Brummell (1778-1840). Weston’s no longer exists—tailors merge, vanish and amalgamate almost as frequently as the Row reinvents its own traditions—but Brummell’s legacy of white linen, a sharp trouser, and an immaculately cut black coat lingers on: the style may change, but in Hart, the principles remain.

You’ll find no such minimalist discipline in the third Savile Rogue, John Pearse, whose shop is tucked away in the tiny, Georgian, Meard Street in Soho. Its interior shows no signs of Pearse’s period as a fashion revolutionary—in 1966 he opened the famous Granny Takes a Trip boutique in the King’s Road, then the epi-centre of fashion. (Carnaby Street? That was for tourists.) Back then, Pearse was known for velvets and satins, for ruffled shirtfronts and lace wrists, and for having a quote from Oscar Wilde above his door. Now, the only thing above the door is his name, in a cool, detached, modernist font. Inside, the finished garments on the rail may be almost classical in cut, but they are often in unexpected shades or weaves—even though the floral jacquards and velvets of the 1960s are long gone, Pearse’s fabrics still cast a spell.

For a revolutionary, Pearse had a very traditional training. “I got kicked out of school at 15, and there was this suit I wanted, so I thought the best way to get it was to learn to make it. So I went in to Henry Poole [ostensibly, and probably, the oldest of the Old Row firms] and as I was sitting there David Niven walked in and I thought, this is all right, I’ll get to meet famous people. And then they said they hadn’t a place for me but I could go round to Dover Street, to Hawes & Curtis, and ask for Mr Watson. So I did, and he said, go over the road, up five flights of stairs and ask for David. And there I stayed, cross-legged in this Fagin’s den with all the young apprentices, and learnt to be a coat-maker.”

Pearse’s approach is almost the opposite to Nick Hart’s. “Tailoring is an entirely personal business,” he says. “You have to psychologically weigh up the customer.” He tailors to his customers—and so is as much a descendent of Beau Brummell as Hart; Brummell refused to patronise the tailors Stultze, because, he claimed, you could recognise a Stultze coat at a hundred yards. The dandy wanted his coat to be about him, not Stultze. Pearse and he would have got along.

Round the corner on Brewer Street, Mark Powell is probably the modern dandy’s tailor of choice: a fine, bald, walking advertisement for his own innovative restlessness in matters of style. Innovation alone—the very word provokes shudders in the Old Row—is enough to guarantee Powell’s inclusion in the Rogues’ Gallery. High-waisted trousers, two- or three-inch waistbands with two or three diagonally set buttons, gauntlet cuffs, peaked lapels on single-breasted suits, mother-of-pearl buttons on dark cloth (an homage to his East End roots, perhaps) and square-cut waistcoats are among his signature details.

“People come to me wanting a gangster thing, me being an East End guy,” he says, “but mine is more of a dandy than a gangster style. I suppose I’d call it a combination of Savile Row classic style and a street/pop culture. As for workmanship, the quality of my product—that should be taken for granted, of course.”

Psychology, again, is important to Powell. “What is the customer like? Why does he want this suit? My first question is: where’s he going to wear it?” Of his craft, he says, “I still do all the measuring and the cutting and fitting. But you should never forget the immigrant workers. Originally it was Jewish people, then Greek-Cypriots, now it’s Malaysians and Singaporeans. They’re the ones doing the construction work.”

And finally, Sir Tom Baker. The same version of an Oscar Wilde quote once blazoned by John Pearse is now inscribed over Baker’s bow-fronted shop in D’Arblay Street: “A man should either be a work of Art or wear a work of Art”.

Baker—the “Sir” is not, you might say, immediately verifiable—trained under the ultra-respectable Hardy Amies, once dressmaker to the Queen; but he is a Rogue nonetheless. He’s certainly not the sort of tailor you’d encounter in the Old Row. Half Italian, half English, he sports bright yellow hair, a studded belt and a general punk attitude. “My look is specific and specialised, but subversive and free,” he says. And he is demanding of his clients. “Never feel the necessity to be reassured by your peers,” he has announced publicly.

Yet, despite all his typically fantastical detailing—despite the top-stitching on the lapels, despite the silver boots, despite the half-gauntlet cuffs (“buttons are boring”)—fundamentally Baker offers, just like the ultra-respectable H. Huntsman, what is known as “the London Cut”: narrow shoulders, narrow sleeve, high armhole, long vents and quite a long skirt to the jacket. He describes this as “a combination of Dickens and rock’n’roll. I like the tubular effect of those trousers in the John Leech illustrations to Dickens. I like to fit a suit right to the bone…but pull the cake out of the oven just before it burns.”

One other thing marks him as a Rogue: his label. It’s sewn where you can see it. With an Old Row suit, nobody ever sees the label: it’s sewn inside the inner pocket. Baker—as you’d hope of a man who dresses Mick Jagger—is a Rogue for sure.

In the last analysis, the Savile Rogues are doing what tailors have always done: cutting their stylistic coats according to the commercial cloth. A bespoke outfit will cost the customer, say, £2,800 for a basic two-piece suit. The cloth will account for £750 or more of that, and there’ll be an average of 75 hours’ skilled labour involved in making it. The tailor will probably net about £500 to cover other overheads and profit—it’s not the road to riches. However fine your craftsmanship, however heartfelt your aesthetic principles, if nobody is buying, you will not survive. The law of top-of-the-scale bespoke tailoring, like the law of the jungle, is find your niche.

As for the future of bespoke, even the tailors don’t know which way it will go. “Bespoke is a dying art,” says John Pearse, “but there’ll always be a place for it.” Jonathan Quearney disagrees. “The younger generation...they have a feeling they’ve found something nobody knows about. I think bespoke is going to come around again, big time.” 

BESPOKE-SPEAK:

Braces, aka suspenders:  Not any more; too “Wall Street”. Only acceptable if hessian, on farmers’ work trousers.

Buttonholes:  Should be slightly ragged at the back—little imperfections are the stamps of bespoke.

Cuffs:  The first two buttons (there should be four) must be made of horn, and must work. How you find out is up to you.

Back:  A hard thing to get right. If it hunches or strains, the suit is not a good one.

Collar:  If the collar stands away from the neck, best to stand away from the man.

Fly:  (NB: never “flies”) Buttons are no longer amusingly archaic. They are simply silly.

Linings:  A bonus of bespoke is being able to choose your lining. But be careful with colour: the line between stylish and foolish is very narrow.

Pleats:  Not now. But they’ll come back.

Pockets:  Slant pockets are falling into favour again, though still considered suspiciously racy among the world’s more conservative diplomatic corps.

Shoulders:  On a good suit, you shouldn’t really notice them.

Turn-ups:  Only on rustics.

Vents:  One is dull. Two is flamboyant. None is incorrect. You can’t win.

STORE INFO:

Sir Tom Baker Bespoke Tailoring: 4 Arblay Street, London W1; +44 (0)20 7437 3366; www.tombakerlondon.com

Spencer Hart: 36 Savile Row, London W1; +44 (0)20 7434 0000; www.spencerhart.com

John Pearse Tailor: 6 Meard Street, London W1; +44 (0) 20 7434 0738;
www.johnpearse.co.uk

Mark Powell Bespoke Tailoring: 12 Brewer Street, London W1; +44 (0) 20 7287 5498; www.markpowellbespoke.co.uk

Jonathan Quearney Bespoke Tailor, Outfitter & Clothier: 7 Windmill Street, London W1; +44 (0) 207 631 5132; www.jonathanquearney.com
 

Picture credit: Guy Hills (top, from left: Nick Hart, Mark Powell, Tom Baker, John Pearse and Jonathan Quearney wear their own tailoring at the Savile Club, London.)

(Michael Bywater is writing a book about male friendship.)