W
ILLIAM TAKES ME BACK to the 19th century when Jacob Dege arrived in England from Germany. “Jacob’s son and my great grandfather
were at Merchant Taylors’ School together. They both had fathers in the tailoring trade but, when they left school, there wasn’t room for them in their respective family businesses so they went off on their own and set up Arthur Dege & Skinner. That went on in the late 1800s, early 1900s but then my great grandfather was killed in a riding accident in Richmond Park aged 42. My grandfather was 14 at the time and the Dege family continued his education until he was 16 and then put him in the business that is now Dege & Skinner.” William’s father Michael, now the firm’s chairman, came into the business in 1953 with William himself joining in 1991, the fifth generation of Skinners. Michael was certainly thrown in at the deep end as one of the first things he had to do was to head down to Westminster for The Queen’s Coronation. “My father and grandfather were at the House of Lords from about 5am,” says William. “We held all the coronation robes for the peers and the job was, on the morning of the coronation in 1953, to go and dress everyone. They had about 100 peers to look after, they had everything lined up and, as you can imagine, it was pretty much mayhem. Winston Churchill refused to wear the correct hat but instead insisted on wearing the Privy Counsellor’s hat.”
The team from 10 Savile Row. “We all have a common goal. If the business doesn’t succeed, we are all out of a job,” says MD William Skinner
Dege & Skinner started off mainly as sporting and
military tailors. There are a lot of adverts going back in the 1800s for riding clothes, and making uniforms kept the business going through the Second World War when they opened shops in Catterick and Aldershot. “We still make uniforms today,” says William. “We go down to Sandhurst and make the uniforms for the young officer cadets there before they join their regiment. We meet the cadets at the end of their second term and make their uniforms for when they pass out at the end of the third term. That means we have about four months to make the uniforms. We have a Royal Warrant to The Queen and have made uniforms for various members of The Royal Family. Prince William and Prince Harry’s first official portrait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery is of them in Dege & Skinner uniforms.” Clearly a lot has changed since 1865 but has
“I happen to have my name above the door but I don’t say people work for me, we work together”
22 SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE
anything stayed the same? “The overall process of making a bespoke suit hasn’t altered too much,” says William. “The process of choosing a fabric, taking measurements, having a pattern drafted, having various fittings as the process goes on, culminating in the finished fitting – how the coat will be made by a coat maker, the trousers by a trouser maker and those individual processes continue today. That is part of coming to a Savile Row bespoke tailor, to go through that process. That hasn’t changed in essence since those early days. What has changed is the style of garments, the weight of garments – they would have been a lot heavier in days gone by when you would spend more time outdoors or even indoors when there wouldn’t be any central heating. People prefer much lighter clothes now.” Unsurprisingly, William puts the relationship between customer and tailor at the centre of
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