BEST OF BRITAIN
SHARP SUITS: SAVILE ROW’S TRADITIONAL TAILORS
Savile Row is famed the world over for its use of the humble woollen cloth to capture and project the physical majesty of monarchs, generals, film stars and business leaders. Yet one only needs to walk down the east side of the street and look into the brightly lit basements to see that the glamour is wholly derived from real people with bent backs and busy fin- gers, each person wearing a tailor’s thim- ble, holed at the end for a quicker push of the needle. The necessity for speed is real, but quality is paramount for the dozens of cutters, coat makers, trouser makers, pressers and finishers. If ever there was a place on earth where ab- solute perfection is strived for every day, it is Savile Row.
The Row’s existence as a tailoring street is entirely indebted to the Englishman’s long love affair with the suit. Fashion historians can actually trace this phe- nomenon to October 18th 1666, a few weeks after the Great Fire of London. According to the diarist Samuel Pepys, Charles II “in Council declared his reso- lution of setting a fashion for clothes,” and on October 18th, Pepys was there to record, “This day the King begins to put on his vest, being a long cassock close to the body and a coat over it… It is a very fine, handsome garment.” John Evelyn
24 FOCUS The Magazine May/June 2018
likewise approved, noting the King’s “re- solving never to alter [the new dress] and to leave the French mode.” Behind that resolution laid the rumour that the Great Fire had been started by a Frenchman, making the birth of the three-piece suit, unquestionably, a political act.
Fast forward to the late 18th century, when French revolutionaries adopted the English country squire’s cutaway coat, necessitating a wrestling back of the gar- ment by none other than Beau Brummell. Through endless consulta- tions with his Mayfair tailors, Brummell turned that cutaway coat into a thing of tailored beauty, darted into the body so that the wool was stretched and shrunk to sculpt his chest, shoulder and waist. A great admirer of Brummell, the poet Lord Byron once remarked, “you might almost say the body thought,” on Brummell in his Schweitzer coat.
Thus, the idea of the dark-suited gentle- man was born. Tailors did not gather on Savile Row until the mid-nineteenth cen- tury, when Henry Poole was able to earn the royal warrant of Napoleon III and had the audacity to decorate the front of his tailoring house with a giant eagle and coronet to announce it. The Emperor was soon followed by the Prince of Wales and throughout the rest of the
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