August 20, 2012 |
Autumn/winter 2012. Set your shoulders, straighten your tie and button up your collar right to the top – it’s the season of the suit. That sounds like the sort of pithy, clipped and overly simplified phrase fashion journalists often spout when they want to knot up their prose in a neat little stylistic bow. But at the Milan and Paris men’s shows in January, it seemed suits were all the eye could see.
A bit like Lawrence of Arabia’s sand-blindness – except, instead of dunes and mirages, there were double breasts and martingales. Granted, there were plenty of variations on the classic whistle and flute (cockney rhyming slang – a sure-fire fallback when you’re running out of vestimaniac verbiage), but fashion-wise they were just different dialects of the same language.
That is kind of what you expect from the menswear shows, the reason many people find them difficult to write about and certainly difficult to splash across the front pages of tabloids. Here’s the thing about suits: they’re boring. That can sometimes mean they’re Trojan Horses for fashion advancing some pretty way-out ideas. Of a winter collection that clashed high-school polar opposites of beefy jocks with skinny, studded punks, the menswear maverick Thom Browne dissected his suits thus: “The ‘Punks’ wore an even smaller, tighter version of my classic suit – with higher armhole and very low-rise trousers – and the ‘Jocks’ wore a more sports-inspired version of the ‘suit’.” On paper, it almost sounds staid – respectable. Until you clock that Browne’s sports inspiration involved pumping his single-breasted blazers with steroids (and goose down) until they approximated the inflatable sumo suits from It’s a Knockout, while the trousers he coyly describes as ‘very low-rise’ barely frot against the pubis. Technically, these were all suits. But not suits as we know them. Was it a conscious decision to advance these ideas through the “season-less” suit? “Yes. Absolutely.”
Browne is the extreme: his catwalk shows are known for their entirely unsuitable<itals> suiting, smothered in frills, furs and feathers, with trousers purely optional. But others followed in his wake this season. Raf Simons cut his in slick, shiny pleather for Jil Sander, Dolce & Gabbana dabbled bullion embroidery across their melton wool, and Lucas Ossendrijver sliced the line of the Lanvin two-piece in a clean arc several Michelin Man inches above the natural shoulder. Suiting and booting for superheroes, super-villains and the super-rich.
So, the perfect excuse for peacockery is when designers pin their sartorial excesses on the conventions of the classic suit. But what happens when there are no designers, when the client creates the garment for themselves? Sounds a recipe for ham-fisted homespun disaster – like Kim Basinger’s one-armed, half-baked Oscar car crash in 1990. But it’s the foundation of the tailoring trade, the bespoke business. “Couture is no different to having a bespoke suit made on Savile Row,” says Daphne Guinness – and while she may frequent Chanel for her gossamer-fine couture, back in January she was measured at Huntsman for a new set of white tie and tails. Female and male, couture and bespoke. They’re two sides of the same custom-minted coin. Is Savile Row homme couture, then? Of a sort – but it actually offers much more freedom. Rather than choosing from the proscribed parade of a couture catwalk show and tweaking to infinity, the bespoke client starts with concept, cloth and cash.
“We do what the customer orders,” says Ritchie Charlton, the managing director of Hayward, the storied Mount Street tailor renowned for dressing the likes of Clint Eastwood, Sir John Gielgud, Michael Caine and Steve McQueen in the 1960s, and today tailor of choice for the likes of Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie and image-maker Nick Knight. “Each customer is different and that’s what bespoke tailoring is about. It’s about the interaction between the tailor and the customer.” That’s the unique selling point of bespoke, even against haute couture. There, the client never meets the people constructing her clothes – in bespoke tailoring, client and tailor are in constant cahoots, tweaking turn-ups, straightening seams and reworking each piece to exacting requirements.
As with lots of things in the tailoring trade, bespoke is a tradition that stretches back several hundred years. At some point during the 18th century, the embroidery and embellishment of male dress began to seem, sell… a bit queer. Of course, this was an English conceit: “Italian” was the term given to any overly effeminate behaviour back in the 1700s, which was not too dissimilar to the British reactions engendered by the sleek, “bumfreezer” Roman suits of the mid-1960s. English men’s clothing, by contrast, drew on sporting clothes, namely those worn for the hunt, eschewing embellishment in favour of a focus on cut and cloth. That focus became a fetish with Beau Brummell and the 19th-century dandies who declared that if John Bull turned to look at you in the street, you were not well dressed. Men’s suiting became black, blue or grey – at a fruity push dark, dark<itals> green, although that was somewhat flamboyant and hence circumspect.
It’s all terribly Puritan and Anglo-Saxon. Which is, oddly enough, the exact reason the idea of bespoke suiting seems so profligate to so many today. “There are very few occasions when men can truly indulge themselves, but having a bespoke suit made is one of them,” says the London tailor Richard James. “We often liken it to visiting a spa, a selfish but enjoyable experience.” The cost isn’t at couture levels – depending on cloth and finish, bespoke suits hover around the low four figures – but it still necessitates couture’s characteristic multiple fittings. “We fit it once initially, there’ll be an intermediate fitting, an advanced stage, then we try it on finished,” says Charlton of a process that is entirely undertaken in the final cloth of the suit. “It can take four or five to get the thing to really look as best as they can.” What the suit ends up as is a tailored second skin, moulded to the body through steaming and stitching and all the artful manipulation of those very many fittings. “A good tailor will make any guy look their best,” continues Charlton. “They’ll understand proportion and balance and how to lengthen someone’s legs, how to balance the sides of their head, whatever idiosyncrasies their figure has – and everyone has got something that can be tweaked. So it makes you feel good but also it really<itals> fits, and the two together make it the most comfortable thing.”
The fit. In an age of off the peg, that’s the true allure of bespoke and its sibling made to measure. Made to measure does pretty much what it says on the tin: the suit is made to your measurements via adjustments to an existing “block” pattern. “In made to measure you can do multiple alterations – you can do a lot, but it’s not quite the same as having someone actually take a set of measurements and alterations for your figure,” says Charlton. “You can’t improve the fittings… distilling the pattern down until it actually fits.” Despite inevitably higher prices, it’s the perfect fit offered by made-to-measure and bespoke options that men are turning to – offered not only by custom tailors, but fashion designers also. “At my store here in NY, about 50% of my business is from the made to measure,” say Browne, of a service that adds an additional 30% to his already-top-end ready-to-wear prices.
“Any element of bespoke design or personalisation is getting a great reaction and I think that can be largely attributed to a feeling of confidence in the product and its craftsmanship,” says Adam Kelly, the buying manager of men’s formalwear at London’s Selfridges. “Over the past 12 months, more than ever, our male customers are starting to realise the full potential of what department-store shopping can offer.” Selfridges’ Tom Ford space, which opened in November 2011, offers a made-to-measure service on a dozen or so styles of suit, each custom order flown to Italy to be tailored and returned within eight weeks. That’s the London equivalent of Ford’s Madison Avenue store policy, where walk-ins are only permitted from 11am to 5pm and an appointment is required at any other time. Swanky.
The reverse is true, of course: almost all leading London tailors now offer lower-priced ready-to-wear and made-to-measure lines alongside their high-end bespoke business. In some, it’s entirely separate: Patrick Grant’s award-winning tailoring establishment Norton & Sons is entirely bespoke, with a ready-to-wear line under the label E Tautz, while Richard James’s bespoke service is located in a separate building around the corner from his flagship on The Row. Savile Row, of course, is the home of tailoring. At least, that’s the way the world sees it. As a name, it represents something: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen titled their clothing line after the birthplace of modern menswear because it stands as a byword for bespoke luxury – and, unlike the flash of haute couture, also stealth wealth – in a ready-to-wear world. And it still offers the highest concentration of bespoke tailors on the planet. “The collective noun for tailors is ‘disguisery’,” says Charlton with a wry smile, “and Savile Row is the only place in the world where you really do have a disguisery… I think that’s what separates Savile Row tailoring from tailoring in the rest of the world.” Suits you.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
by Alexander Fury
