means a lot to me. I have two teenage children. If they wanted to come into the business, I would want them to come in for the right reasons and I would expect them to bring something to the table rather than them feeling it’s their right. It wouldn’t be fair on them just to bring them in and tell them to get on with it. There are a lot of other things to do in this world. You have to want to do it and my advice to them would be to go out and get some experience elsewhere and then, if you want to come into the business, come in.” When we meet, William is preparing to go out to
Hong Kong for the first time. “It’s always been quite a global business but it seems to be stretching a bit,” he
Father and son: 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
“The customer puts their trust in us as their tailor to make sure they look good”
says. “We do a lot of business in America, Europe and the UK and also the Middle East. Now it’s going further out to the Far East and, soon, Hong Kong. We need to maintain existing relationships with our customers but we also need to make sure we can get into the markets that want to have bespoke clothing made for them. We offer something eclectic, niche and unique and we need to keep telling people our story.”
CHURCHILL AND THE CASE OF THE TWO HATS
The day of The Queen’s Coronation in 1953 was recalled by Dege & Skinner chairman Michael Skinner in his book The Savile Row Cutter, which he wrote in conjunction with Hormazd Narielwalla. In this extract, he remembers preparing Sir Winston Churchill I helped my father and John Dege dress Sir Winston Churchill. He was a great man with a strong personality and a wonderful sense of humour. He had recently been given the historic title of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, which entitled him to wear the Lord Warden’s uniform. He had also been invested as a Knight of the Garter (England’s premier Order of
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Chivalry) and was therefore entitled to wear a Garter Mantle, which he wore over his Cinque Ports’ uniform. He loved his rich blue garter mantle but did not care for the big, floppy blue velvet Tudor hat, with its wide brim and ostrich feather sticking out of the top. In the procession from Westminster Abbey, he wanted to wear his Garter Mantle, but with his Lord Warden’s hat. We tried to persuade him that this was not correct protocol but Churchill decided to take both. It was not altogether surprising that photographs later revealed him wearing his preferred hat! No one (except us) was any the wiser, so the great man and his dressers shared a unique moment in history.
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