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as a cutter dealing directly with customers. However, when potential employers were faced with his “curly hair, my West Indian accent, that wasn’t happening. I was turned down from every job”. Although he was the “most experienced and qualified” of the eight graduates from LCF and, with more than 40 tailoring houses in the Mayfair and St. James’s area, the demand for staff was enormous, he still struggled to find work. “John Dege [of Dege & Skinner] said, ‘Our customers wouldn’t take kindly to a foreigner, but if you want a job in the workroom, we can give you a job there’.” This time Andrew, now aged 22, was determined not to settle for the workroom. Fortunately, Maurice Sedwell then called LCF looking for a new staff member. “I still have the piece of paper the head of the college, Mr Clark, gave me: ‘Maurice Sedwell, 78304’, written in pencil,” Andrew says. “I got a one-month trial.” To get the job, he had to give up using “Madan” as his first name. “I was told, ‘We can’t call you that here’.” From then on, he introduced himself as Andrew.


A


ndrew does not attribute his difficulties to racism on the Row, but rather to a lack of “confidence that [employers could] keep customers if they had a West Indian in the


front of the shop”. Sedwell had Andrew mainly doing back-office work and alterations, still not what he yearned to be doing but, because so many alterations were being requested, Andrew was able to convince his boss that he needed to be present at fittings to see if they could be


“I had heard of all the big names who came to Savile Row and I wanted to be a part of that”


improved. “It was just to stand and look, not get involved,” he says. Only after customers had left could he make suggestions. Gradually he was allowed to fit trousers on customers and one day found himself dealing with MP Mark Lennon-Boyd, then Parliamentary private secretary to the Secretary of State for Energy. Lennox- Boyd was unhappy about two of his Sedwell suits. “I made a comment on the suits and said that if he let us have the suits back, then I would have them fit perfectly. He sent them back and I fixed them. He then phoned up Mr Sedwell and asked what my name was.” Andrew recalls the MP’s exact words: “‘Next time I come to your establishment, I want him to do my fittings’.” Soon Lennox-Boyd became Parliamentary private secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Andrew found himself doing the fittings for six members of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet. “At one time I was doing 90% of cutting and fitting,”


he says. Andrew would go on to make several suits for Princess Diana, most famously the midnight blue cashmere jacket she wore for her 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir. “The briefing went to designer Katherine Walker and I was the tailor,” he


34 SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE


In 2008, The Queen awarded Andrew Ramroop an OBE; the first Savile Row tailor to win one


says, the goal being to create something “simple and classic”. Not until he turned on the television that night did Andrew discover for what occasion the suit had been made. “It looked black and sombre. It was a sombre interview.” He is not one to name more names, but a few of his customers have willingly displayed their appreciation, including cricketers Brian Lara and Mark Ramprakash and film stars Tony Curtis and Samuel L. Jackson. “Soft-structured tailoring” is the way Andrew likes to describe the suit-making style he has created at Maurice Sedwell. “There is some firmness to what we do but not hardness. The Italian way is not as structured.” From the 1970s, Andrew has gradually developed a rather intricate signature style for Maurice Sedwell, involving slightly narrower shoulders and wider sleeves, with delta lapels and delta pocket flaps that mirror the bottom front edges of the jacket, and including a front pocket that follows the line of the shoulder. Yet Andrew is keen to say: “I work on expressing an individuality for customers. So [creating a suit] is more of a communication with that customer, getting to know their lifestyle ... trying to some extent to get them not to conform to a sartorial image that is expected in a business environment”, and, most of all, encouraging them to “want to stand out”. He likes to say that a customer does not come to Maurice Sedwell to buy a suit but rather “to commission a sartorial image”. Here, where the 16 people who work for


Andrew are all trained to cut, fit and make garments, there is no room for ready-to-wear or made-to-measure. “The nerve centre of any tailoring business is the tailoring room, it’s not the cutting room,” he says, aware that his ambitious younger self might not have said this. “You can be a fantastic cutter, but a tailor can destroy you with bad workmanship. But you can be a mediocre cutter, and a handcraft tailor is the one who can make you look good.” For his “ultra bespoke” suits that receive a


whopping 130 hours of hand-tailoring and bear a starting price of £6,000, so much value


lies in the details. “No one makes a suit like us,” Andrew says. He points to the five-button working cuffs and glossy Milanese button holes that adorn lapels, some sporting an array of rainbow-thread colours against the suit’s dark background – an oh-so-slight reminder of the vibrant carnival that Andrew returns to enjoy in Trinidad every year. These days greater challenges are provided by the


trend toward lighter weight cloths, and Andrew is eager to stress that tailoring must “respond to the demands of [a hotter] environment”. With customers in no less than 60 countries, bespoke suits have to be made comfortable enough to wear in the most sweltering of climates. Moreover, the fact that his luxury suits are not subject to fashion trends and never need to be thrown out makes them a kind of “eco-clothing”. “What we do [on Savile Row] is unique and relevant,” Andrew observes, “and you’ve got to be relevant.” n


Dr Cindy Lawford gives regular tours of Savile Row To find out more, go to cindylawford.co.uk


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