BESPOKE SERVICE


To produce a Savile Row suit requires at least 50 hours of hand work and involves eight or more sets of hands... There is life in true bespoke clothes, a passion.


meet the customers. This appealed to Sargent more than sewing and having joined Gieves in September 1996 on a three-month’s trial as a trimmer, she swiftly moved up through the arcane hierarchy of the profession.


“The trimmer is responsible for getting the required cloth and coordinating the linings, buttons, threads and so on,” she explains. “You are a link between the cutter and the tailoring workroom. After only six months I was made assistant cutter, or the ‘striker’ for the cutter, meaning I cut out the cloth he had marked up for garments. In 1998 I became an undercutter, which meant I saw the customers with the cutter. In 2000, more than three years after I joined, I was allowed to see a customer as a cutter myself. I was very pleased by my rapid progress; some people spend 10 years in the workshop before they are permitted to see a customer.” Sargent’s unusually brisk advance was not due to any reverse sexual discrimination but rather to her own hard work and her own application. She would regularly come into work at weekends to practice her cutting skills, trying to perfect ways of turning a two-dimensional idea into a three-dimensional reality. “In the bespoke business, the cutter is the architect and the tailors are the builders. As a cutter, you have to meet with the customer, listen to what he or she wants the clothes for, understand his or her needs, and help them choose the appropriate cloth and recommend ideas that will work for them. The cutter measures them and then cuts a pattern for a garment that will accentuate the good features of their body and disguise the less good parts.” While self-employed provincial


Kathryn Sargent’s cutting skills have been built up over 16 years on Savile Row. Left: A slick three-piece suit for a client’s wedding


tailors – where they still exist – might cut and tailor an entire suit from start to finish, in Savile Row, the tailoring responsibilities are literally in the hands of highly skilled specialist craftspeople. Trouser makers do nothing but make trousers; waistcoat makers do nothing but make waistcoats. Large firms like Gieves employ tailors on the premises, but like smaller firms and other big firms they also use self-employed tailors, many of which are based across Regent Street in Soho.


Sargent, who is 37, explains:


“Savile Row is unique for the volume of high-class tailoring it produces and for the level of hand craft that goes in to each garment. The entire process of making a suit involves a cutter, an undercutter, a trimmer, a coat maker, a trouser maker, a coat finisher, a trouser finisher and a presser.”


The coat maker initially bastes, or sews together with temporary stitches, the pieces of cloth for the jacket. The trouser maker does the same for the pants. Once the


garment has been tried on by the customer and the fit has been tweaked where necessary by the cutter, the final stitching can be applied. The finisher is responsible for details like buttonholes and edges. The presser has the skilled job of moulding shape into the jacket and putting a sharp crease into the trousers.


TWO OR THREE FITTINGS Sargent’s initial meeting with a new customer might take up to three hours; it will certainly take an hour. When a first garment is being made, two or three fittings might be required to make sure that every detail is correct and every aspect works. The labour intensive nature of the process explains why bespoke tailoring of Savile Row quality comes with a sizable price tag. In her new business, Sargent’s two-piece suits start at £3,200 plus VAT. To produce a Savile Row suit


requires at least 50 hours of hand work and involves eight or more sets of hands. A decent cloth –


christopherward.co.uk


woven in the UK more often than not – costs from £150 a metre and there are at least three and half metres in a suit. True bespoke should not be confused with made-to-measure, in which a pre- determined pattern is amended to fit a customer’s proportions. True bespoke results in an unique garment, conceived and made purely for one person to wear and to enjoy.


As Kathryn Sargent explains: “There is a life in bespoke clothes, a passion. They are made by highly skilled people and they have a bit of those people in it. When the clothes are being made the client is talked about as if he or she is in the room. My satisfaction comes in seeing a two- dimensional idea turned into stunning 3-D reality. I love to see my clients wearing my garments confidently, to see what it means to them.”


Kathryn Sargent, Savile Row Bespoke Tailor, is located at 6 Sackville Street, London W1S 3DD www.kathrynsargent.com


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