TROYAL WEDDING E
CRAFTSMANSHIP
HE BIG INTERVIEW
VERY WEDNESDAY, AND ONLY ON WEDNESDAYS, a living legend comes to work at Bernard Weatherill on Savile Row. As he heads down the metal steps to begin cutting in the basement, this unassumingly soft- spoken tailor passes a colourful sign that proclaims the
firm to be riding clothes outfitters “by appointment to HM The Queen”. He knows that the perfection of his own workmanship is the one and only reason for that long-held Royal Warrant. That man is 74-year-old Michael Smith, the last bespoke
breeches cutter and maker in the world, having served as sporting tailor to a list of international celebrities and most of the elite English country set, including Prince Charles, Prince Philip and The Queen. He has had to slow down, take care of his heart. Nearly 60 years of tailoring have left him with callused fingers and a metal joint in his right knee, injured from putting too much weight on it while standing for innumerable days at the cutting board. However, the sparkle in his eye declares that he intends to practise his craft for as long as he is physically able.
NATURAL INSTINCT “When you’re as skilful as Michael, you don’t need to show off,” says Johnny Allen, head of bespoke tailoring at Kilgour, which merged with Bernard Weatherill in the 1950s. “They call it rock of eye. He has a natural instinct and a natural eye for making a coat or a pair of breeches with a really beautiful balance to it, so you look good standing as well as riding.” A friend of Michael’s for 20 years, Johnny actually knows the year that Michael began working for Bernard Weatherill - 1959. And he fully appreciates the rarity of Michael’s accomplishment. “Where will you ever see that again, when somebody gives the majority of his life from the age of 15 to one company, to something very specialist and intricate?” To fit a customer, Michael has to measure both sides of the body, including individual differences in the length of the inside legs and the width of the calves, so that boots can fit easily over high-waisted breeches. Johnny continues: “Michael also cuts the ladies’ habits ... the side-saddle habits they wear cross-legged on the horse, and then they have an apron. . . . That’s a long skirt and then a cutaway dressage coat. He made that for the Queen. You cut it in a single piece on the floor so you have to open the whole fabric out. It can’t be cut on a cutting table . . . because it’s so big.” Even when he worked at Huntsman, Johnny was sending customers to Michael “because there was nobody else to make a hunting coat or to make a cutaway dressage coat”. Michael remembers when he started working for Bernard
Weatherill in Aldershot as an apprentice to a riding and hunting clothes maker, who kept a close watch over him. “I was a year learning felling, cross-stitching, back-stitching,” he recalls. “They wouldn’t let me work on anything properly for a year.” The five employees had to climb some “rickety old stairs” up to a “horrible” room that was “a sort of hayloft, which you wouldn’t be allowed [to use] these days”. The room was heated by one stove, and it was the job of the apprentice to light each morning. “It was freezing
bloody cold,” says Michael, who describes the atmosphere as “very Victorian almost”. But the atmosphere improved two years’ later when his future
wife, Elizabeth, began working there, one of two so-called female “kippers”, as an apprentice finisher. Michael says it took another two years for him to ask Elizabeth out for a date, when she was 17 and he 19. In 1964, Bernard Weatherill transferred him to Conduit Street in Mayfair, where he began to learn the art of cutting and eventually rose to become head cutter. The couple married in 1966 and, although she left the workroom to raise a family, Elizabeth did not neglect practising her skills. She has continued to make the beautiful button holes that adorn her husband’s breeches but, Michael says, “her hands are giving up on her now”. In contrast to a pair of bespoke trousers that take one day to make, riding or hunting breeches can take as long as three days. The reason is the cloth: 32-ounce Bedford cord, a cloth that can stand up to the rigours of life on horseback in the mud and rain and last for years, a cloth that punishes the hands of its breeches maker, who must use a short needle called a “blunt” to push the waxed thread through it -- straight up and down and even. Repetition and more repetition was essential for Michael to master the skills. “This is artwork,” says Sandra Kotei, head
In contrast to a pair of bespoke trousers that take one day to make, riding or hunting breeches can take as long as three days
of the School of Bespoke Tailoring and a great admirer of Michael Smith. I meet her on the day she has brought two students to Bernard Weatherill in the hope that Michael will grant them a few moments of his time. And he does, mindful that his is a skill in desperate danger of dying out, as the less expensive ready- to-wear breeches have long dominated a market where most buyers are oblivious to the superior look, fit and comfort of bespoke breeches.
PERFECTLY PROPORTIONED Another of his challenges, Michael says, is
“getting people’s minds the right way around. Sometimes they don’t want [their breeches] long but they’ve got to be long to get them on the horse. Otherwise they tear.” Many of Michael’s keen riding customers have been coming back to him for decades, like the man in shop when I arrive, who is telling Michael “about people I know and he knows”, including those who have passed away. “They become friends,” Michael says. “I have one or two [customers] who still [hunt] three or four days a week”, with “good horses every time”. Michael, who produced the outfits
for the British Olympic Equestrian team in 1996, has famously never ridden a horse himself, though he says he regularly enjoys watching point-to-point racing. With their perfectly proportioned bags, knees, and six- buttoned calves, Michael’s hunting and riding breeches cost £1,800 today, what might be seen as a fairly reasonable price for a piece of vanishing history. “It’s precious to work with Michael,” Johnny Allen says. “You have that feeling you’ll never see the like of him again.” n Dr Cindy Lawford is a Savile Row tour guide
cindylawford.co.uk
SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE 41
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