Waking up to reality

AN ACCOUNTANT AT Henry Poole & Co. cost the legendary Savile Row tailors a customer called Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. Churchill had been getting his suits made by Henry Poole since 1905, and was its biggest customer through the 1920s and 1930s, even after the 1929 Wall Street collapse. In 1940, Churchill was elected Prime Minister of Britain, and an accountant at Henry Poole decided to get him to settle his dues. He sent off a bill to Downing Street. “Churchill never returned,” laments Angus Cundey, 76, chairman of the 207-year-old tailoring house. He no longer remembers how much the bill was, or indeed if it was ever paid, but it was “insignificant to the prestige of having the Prime Minister’s account”.

“It was an early lesson in adapting to the needs of the customer,” says Cundey, still regretful about the loss. (Churchill still matters to Henry Poole, and its website mentions Churchill’s first order.) From the time Shropshire tailor James Poole opened his shop in London’s Savile Row (the first tailor on the street that’s now synonymous with fine tailoring) in 1846, it has outfitted monarchs, nobles, and occasionally, industrialists and people in show business.

In fiction, this was the home of the immaculately dressed Phileas Fogg (of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days); in real life, in the late 1800s and through the early 1900s, Savile Row kitted out the Empire. It’s now fighting to survive in a home it barely recognises. It held on for a bit to serve the new royalty even as Nutters of Savile Row measured The Beatles (and Bianca Jagger’s wedding gown). But the days of titled nobility wandering in for a morning fitting (and conveniently forgetting to pay) are long gone. Last year, Henry Poole made 1,500 suits, down from 12,000 in the mid-20th century.

Today, Savile Row and establishments like Henry Poole, seem anachronistic. And that’s why people like Cundey are trying to reinvent their businesses, and explain to their new clientele (tech entrepreneurs, Bollywood stars, real estate tycoons) why a suit needs three fittings at least (one to adjust it to the client’s posture, one to refine the drape over the shoes and check the fit of the seat of the trousers, and one that includes personalised recommendations on caring for the suit). They are also forced to explain why a suit costs upwards of £3,000 (Rs 3 lakh) and takes eight weeks to make.

“THE PEOPLE IN Savile Row have always been content with what has been happening here, their craft, and their little world. But we cannot survive like that anymore. We have to scale up,” says Ray Clacher, managing director at Gieves & Hawkes. His 240-year-old brand and its iconic address, No. 1 Savile Row (Poole is at No. 15), symbolise the changes in the rarefied world of bespoke suits. In 2002, Gieves & Hawkes was sold to Hong Kong’s Wing Tai Properties for £10 million. Last year, that was taken over by Hong Kong’s Trinity Group, which also owns the Peninsula Hotel.

Gieves & Hawkes is not the only Savile Row establishment that’s no more with the founding families. In fact, Henry Poole is pretty much the only company that is still family-run. The Row’s most expensive tailor, Huntsman (suits start at £4,000), was sold to hedge fund manager Pierre Lagrange and his partner, Lebanese-born fashion designer Roubi L’Roubi. It’s not just that companies are moving out of family control; they are becoming parts of conglomerates. And that’s leading to what can, for lack of a better term, be called the globalisation of Savile Row.

Clacher is clear that Gieves & Hawkes has to look beyond the “sceptred isle” if it wants to grow. “That our licence partner in China was making far more money than the parent company, and bought out the entire business, is an insight into our business,” says Clacher. At the time of sale, Trinity ran 100 Gieves & Hawkes stores in China. Clacher says he is looking to add another 17 in China by the end of the year, and open five to six stores in India over the next decade. His vision, he says, is to make Gieves & Hawkes a mega-brand. Like Ermenegildo Zegna, I ask, to which he only smiles.

The process of creating a brand is headed by Gieves & Hawkes creative director Jason Basmajian, formerly of Brioni. “We had history. But we never had a notion of brand,” says Basmajian. “We need to show the world that the suit is not over.” He is also looking over his shoulder. Dolce & Gabbana, the stylish Italian label, has just opened a men’s tailoring store on New Bond Street, minutes away. “There is competition not only from Savile Row labels but also European ones, and even Ralph Lauren Purple or Black lines. What we have is history... The Italians learnt suit making here and then took it to the world. We want to reclaim that.”

SAVILE ROW ALSO wants to claim new markets. “Some of the best customers on Savile Row are Indians, and I am clear that we have to be there,” says Clacher. There’s no Savile Row franchise in India, but everyone is looking to enter. “We almost opened our first store in Mumbai in 2008,” says Cundey, “but then the downturn came and at the last moment the partner backed out. But we are now very keen to open in Mumbai and are looking for a partner.”

Richard James, one of Savile Row’s youngest labels, has lined up a distribution partnership with The Collective, a designer boutique range in Delhi, and held a fashion show in Mumbai. James’s business partner Sean Dixon says 12% of their business comes from Japan, though the U.S. and Britain remain the biggest markets.

Gieves & Hawkes is pushing newer frontiers, and plans to open four stores in Mongolia. “The No. 1 shop for Gieves & Hawkes in terms of sales is in a place called Taiyuan, which is full of high-profile coal executives and they want the best suits. This is the future,” says Clacher.

Henry Poole was one of the first Savile Row establishments to develop a franchise model in 1964 when it set up shop in Japan. Today, there are nine such franchises in Japan, as well as one each in Beijing and Hangzhou in China. “We realise that we have to move fast,” says Cundey, and indeed, Henry Poole is doing just that under Samuel Cundey, the son, who started the practice of setting up fittings across the world for customers who can’t visit London. Today, 45% of Henry Poole’s revenue comes from the U.S., and Samuel Cundey has ensured that there are fittings in 10 American cities, from New York to Los Angeles.

In all this, the existing Savile Row shops are not being neglected. Gieves & Hawkes under Basmajian, for instance, is now turning into a one-stop tailoring establishment. Customers who walk in, will be able to get their suits made, of course, but can also buy ready-to-wear versions. The brand has been extended to perfumes, sunglasses, and shoes.

Something similar is going on at Henry Poole, though Cundey is clear that suits will always be bespoke. But because, he says, walk-in customers often demand instant gratification, the store sells ties and cufflinks off the shelf. “Also, they can easily be sold online,” says Cundey.

That’s the other big Savile Row change— online retail and social media. In the snooty world of bespoke clothing, it’s easy to miss the importance of commonplace things as “Likes” on Facebook, or recommendations on Twitter. But that’s where new customers are going to come from. So, Henry Poole is on Twitter and Facebook. Gieves & Hawkes is preparing to launch an online platform for dressing. “You will be able to go in and pick exactly the suit you want—from the fabric to the cut, colour, stitching, lining, and buttons. Every single thing. And then, you can choose to come by for measurements, or order online by sending measurements,” says Clacher.

Cundey adds that tradition is now “in”, thanks to the huge popularity of television series such as Downton Abbey, which has seen a revival of all things traditionally British. “You might not need a morning coat, a frock coat, a dress coat, and a dinner jacket any more, but you still need to be elegant and nothing does that better than a bespoke suit.” And that means good tailors are in demand again, although Henry Poole no longer employs the 300 sewing tailors and 14 cutters it once did. Now the firm has four senior cutters and 34 sewing tailors. In a sign of the times, there are also women—unheard of even 20 years ago—on the work floor; one of them, Emily Squires, even won the Golden Shears (the so-called sartorial Oscars) this year.

Cundey says Savile Row is not just about good tailoring. Clients, especially those who don’t come from old money, often need help, he says. “They keep making more money and suddenly one day they have entered a world where a certain degree of refinement is required,” says Cundey. “How does one dress to dinner with a head of state? That’s a world we know all about.” After all, he adds, “we invented the dinner jacket”. Pressed for details, he says it was in 1865, when Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (who became King Edward VII), asked his friend Henry Poole to make a short blue evening coat for informal dinners. The prince, notorious for his roving eye, was besotted by actress Cora Urquhart Brown Potter, and invited her and her wealthy American husband, James Brown Potter, to his country retreat in Sandringham. With no clue about what to wear to royal dinners, Potter asked Poole for advice, and a similar blue coat was suggested. He was so taken with the style, he took it with him to America. When the Tuxedo Club opened near New York City, Potter wore a similar coat there—and the tuxedo came to be.

SUCH STORIES FASCINATE new customers. But not all stories are public. “We are among the most discreet people in the world,” says Cundey. “A U.S. Secretary of State once came to Paris during the Vietnam War and during his trial fitting discussed plans to end the war in three weeks with the U.S. ambassador in Paris. Not a word went out.” Even today, Cundey refuses to name the secretary, though it’s easy to figure who he was.

What these establishments are willing to reveal is a partial list of famous customers, even though a full list may be better for business. The full list of Savile Row customers could easily pass off as the Who’s Who of the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s difficult to imagine a Savile Row shop that’s less than a hundred years old. Which is why, when Richard James set up his eponymous store in Savile Row some 21 years ago, he says: “There was very much a sense of ‘Who are these people? What do they know?’”

But James got off easier than Abercrombie & Fitch, which was greeted with protests when it announced plans to set up shop in Savile Row. In 2007, the American label launched a store in nearby Mayfair with a raucous party that had Savile Row shuddering. When its Savile Row plans were made public, there were protests (with carefully written signs that said, “Give three-piece a chance”, and even “Fitch off, Abercrombie [please]”) from fans of traditional tailoring.

Gustav Temple, founder and editor of The Chap, a magazine dedicated to a revival of sartorial elegance, wrote in The Guardian that: “The opening of an Abercrombie & Fitch store could well sound the death knell for the Row.” Abercrombie & Fitch is still trying to enter Savile Row, and the battle is being closely followed by the British press.

James says change is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s up to the tailors like him to “take Savile Row to people who don’t always wear a suit”. James and L’Roubi may well represent the new face of Savile Row. Richard James is a £10 million company that considers itself best placed to embrace a new wave of change because “we have always been New Establishment”. “We were clear that a new generation of people wanted the best suits in the world but they don’t want to wait for three months,” says James, while L’Roubi is doing something more radical—he’s appealing to women. “This idea that Savile Row is only for men is dated. In the Huntsman archives is evidence that Katherine Hepburn, Julie Andrews, and Elizabeth Taylor got special orders made from us,” he says, adding that gender bias will not help in the hunt for new customers.

James says he saw the change coming a decade ago. “On one day, at the same time, we had a British lord, I really can’t name him, Elton John, and Liam Gallagher at our shop ordering suits. And they were very, very different suits. John wanted something in wacky colours, Gallagher wanted a grunge-looking suit, and his lordship’s choice was very classic. That’s when I realised that our world was changing and would change even more.”

That’s the change Savile Row is struggling to deal with. But even as ready-to-wear suits and (shudder) £15 socks are seen on shelves, the tailors here are clear that the age of bespoke is not dead. L’Roubi voices their thoughts: “There is only one thing that is finally constant—if you want something tailored, there is only one place in the world you should go, that is Savile Row.”