STYLE TRENDS


TONY GAZIANO IS IN NO DOUBT. “ONE OF THE best decisions we made was to be on Savile Row. There is not another street in Mayfair that I would prefer to be on,” he tells me. “In fact, the only thing I would change is that I wish we had done it earlier!” Tony is one half of Gaziano & Girling, the high-class shoe company he and Dean Girling formed back in 2006 and which moved into No. 39 on London’s finest street for fashion eight years later, and Tony can’t contain his delight at the success of their decision. “The company was taken more seriously after we moved on to Savile Row and has grown rapidly since we have been here,” he says. “It was 2013 and we had decided we wanted to open a shop but didn’t quite know where. There was a choice of three or four locations – Jermyn Street, the Burlington Arcade or the Princess Arcade, or Savile Row. We thought Jermyn Street was a little bit tired as well as over-saturated


PAIR


Daniel Evans hears how Tony Gaziano and Dean Girling teamed up and chose Savile Row for their first shoe store


with shoe brands, and the arcades were not really where we wanted to go, so we chose Savile Row, which has proved to be the best possible solution. We can feed off the tailors as there has never really been a good shoe shop on Savile Row and we have a lot of friends here. Since we opened the shop in early 2014, we have never had a negative week.”


S


itting in the leather armchairs at Gaziano & Girling, you feel you are in a business which has been established for many years. The fine shoes on display, the relaxed atmosphere – not to


mention the excellent coffee – all combine to transport you away from what is a retail outlet to the comfort of your favourite club. All very impressive, certainly when Tony recalls the first days of the company, back in 2006. “I had a workshop in my garage in Kettering while Dean was working from his shed in his garden in Norwich,” says Tony. “If we wanted to meet up, one of us faced a two-hour drive. There were certainly some scary moments at the beginning but we backed ourselves and always had confidence in our ability. We knew we had to produce shoes that were better than anyone else was producing. “We were competing with other companies with


more than a hundred years of history behind them and the only way to pull people away from that was to make a product that was outstanding enough for them to


SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE 51


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