INTERVIEW
Lady W
Leading
Kathryn Sargent may have made history by being the first lady tailor in Savile Row but Diana Butler discovers she is too busy focusing on her customers to worry about labels
hen you go to fashion college you dream of having your own label; every fashion student does. Then you start
work and you put it out of your mind.” So says Kathryn Sargent, interviewed just
weeks before she made Savile Row history by becoming the first lady tailor to take up residency in the Row. And although Kathryn is truly deserving of her place in the Row, and in history, she still appears to be slightly nonplussed by this turn of events. “I had thought being head cutter at Gieves &
Hawkes would be enough. I couldn’t imagine not working there because it’s very much a family atmosphere. There were a couple of people who had worked for the company for more than 25 years and that’s what I aspired to do,” explains Kathryn. So how did this girl from Leeds, who admits to not knowing anything about Savile Row when she first came to study in London in the 1990s, end up with the keys to number 37? “I had travelled south to Epsom to study fashion and in my final year I did a work experience placement at a tailors in Denman and Goddard street. I was really interested in pattern cutting
and had come across some old pattern books,” many of which now fill the shelves of her Brook Street atelier. “I was interested in wearing tailored suits myself, things I used to get in charity shops and my tutor said that the best thing to do is to take a garment apart and look at how it’s made and then put it back together again. I started doing things like that and he then casually suggested: ‘why don’t you go and have a look at Saville Row?’.” That simple suggestion was to transform
Kathryn’s life. “I was brave enough to go into a few tailors, which included a meeting with Peter Day and David Cook at Denman & Goddard. They offered me some work experience and to be honest, I was practically more in Savile Row in my final year than I was at college! “My initial placement was just two weeks, but
I kept going back in my summer holidays right up until I graduated. I decided straightaway that I loved Savile Row – it seemed to me to be traditional and had values. Things were done in a certain way, to a certain quality that I hadn’t seen before. I think that was really impressive and the way that the tailors themselves were dressed and the way they conducted themselves was really appealing too.” R
Kathryn Sargent in her new shop at 37 Savile Row R 14 SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE
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