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in Venice, fitted so snugly that it left no doubt as to which side he dressed. Celebrity nuptials became something of a thing for Tommy. John Lennon wore cream corduroy for his wedding to Yoko Ono on Gibraltar. For Elton John’s marriage in 1984 Tommy made 20 suits, “two of each, in case of mishap”, as he later recalled, “in a wide range of primary colours, including orange and very bright yellow. With each outfit went the appropriate straw boater.” John Reid, Elton John’s manager, has said: “It was quite an event going to Nutters. You’d write the whole day off. Maybe you’d have lunch and a couple of bottles of champagne.” Tommy has said that when things became “edgy” with Elton he would send out for a bottle of sherry “to smooth things along”. For Elton’s 36th birthday, Tommy made a suit overlaid with 1,009,444 bugle beads, each one painstakingly attached by hand. Tommy also applied his craft to dressing female icons of swinging London, like the red-velvet suit for Twiggy which became a celebrated and much copied look when she was photographed wearing it in the early Seventies.


People were attracted to Tommy not only because of his ineffable sense of style but because of his ironic personality


People were attracted to Tommy not only because of his ineffable sense of style, but because of his ironic personality. He was a humourist with a wide and interesting circle of friends who were attracted by his enthusiasm, his gentle self- mocking personality and his acerbic comments on the vagaries of others, always ending with the expression, “But who am I to talk?” He was a witty correspondent and his letters to his friends are treasured. In addition, he delighted in writing to the serious newspapers on topics as far ranging as the correct buttoning of the suit on a statue of John F Kennedy, to the scarcity of deckchairs in London’s Green Park. Tommy died of Aids in August 1992, aged 49.


“The saddest thing of all,” he once wrote, “is an in-between look.” No-one could ever have accused him of that. At his memorial service in St George’s, Hanover Square, just up the road from Savile Row, Cilla Black read an abridged excerpt from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, relating the story of “A true, a perfect gentle Knight … In dying in his excellence and flower, when he is certain of his high good name; for then he gives to friend, and self, no shame.” The final words should go to Nutters loyalist


Elton John who said: “Tommy completely glamorised Savile Row and made it accessible.” There’s no arguing with that…


26 SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE


EVERYONE WAS WELCOME AT NUTTERS


Lance Richardson on the impact Nutters had when it opened on Savile Row


House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row by Lance Richardson, published by


Chatto & Windus. £25


Nutters of Savile Row was located at No. 35a, on the western side of the street. The glass frontage was framed by a waxed pine portico with four Corinthian columns, each topped by acanthus leaves; and an ornate wooden door, salvaged from a house in Isleworth that began to stick almost from the moment it was installed. Fixed to the door were two heraldic crests - each of them sporting an original H snapped to the more appropriate N - that resembled Napoleon’s monogram on the gates at Fontainebleau.


Pushing inside, the showroom was not particularly


spacious: just 540 square feet. To best exploit the tight fit, Tommy brought in his friend, Michael Long, who brought in a Jaeger shop-fitting expert. Together they conspired to evoke Tommy’s desired aesthetic - “elegant with a touch of the sombre” - through a combination of old and new furnishings: chocolate-coloured carpet, a Greek frieze, chic Wassily chairs, and dark lacquered slat shelving for bolts of British cloth. One entire wall was given over to a 12-foot mirror, conjuring an illusion of greater depth. Spotlights, suspended from the ceiling behind carved wooden pelmets, illuminated a single rack of finished samples, where each garment was draped from a NUTTERS-branded hanger. Rounding out the decor were two changing rooms with pull- curtains, and a small desk with a bottle stashed in the top drawer; Tommy liked to sip sherry from a teacup. He also liked to use an atomizer to scent the showroom with patchouli. “People seem to think that our shop is going to be all flashing lights and music and we’ll all be freaking out all over the place,” he once remarked. “It is not like that at all.” Well, maybe just a little.


EYECATCHING DISPLAYS The front window displays were a masterclass in exhibitionism. While everybody else on Savile Row hid behind frosted glass and modest bronze nameplates, Nutters opted for clear sheet glass, prominent stencilled lettering – NUTTERS - and a rotating line- up of eye-catching displays beamed straight from the brain of Michael Long: a painted mural of Egyptian ruins; a Punch and Judy puppet show; “a riot of Royal Purple and Fuchsia-coloured ostrich feathers.” Huntsman may have had Royal Warrants, and Poole


may have had bits and pieces left over from the Great Exhibition of 1851, but Nutters had, for a time, red


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