The Coat Route (4 page)

His most obvious legacy can be seen wherever there are men dressed in coats and ties. But he did much more than pave the way for modern business attire. He also helped change the idea of what it meant to be superior in a society that had rigid ideas about class. “
His excellence was entirely personal, unsupported by armorial bearings, ancestral halls, vast lands, or even a fixed address,” Hollander wrote in
Sex and Suits
.

Brummell’s immense fame and influence demonstrated that rank and titles no longer made the man. All that was needed was some serious attitude—and an excellent tailor.

I
n the footsteps of Mr. Brummell, I set off down the east side of Savile Row, toward the terraced houses built by Lord Burlington, which house the street’s oldest tailoring establishments. My first stop is Henry Poole & Co, at No. 15. I know the public is invited inside, but as I push open the heavy door I have the feeling that
a firm but terribly polite bouncer will turn me away. Inside, I find Angus Cundey, the hawk-faced chairman of the firm, gamely greeting visitors—even those of us who look as if we may not know the difference between a hacking jacket and a flak jacket. Cundey, a direct descendant of the original Mr. Poole, who started the business in 1806, stands near a low octagonal walnut-and-brass display case filled with silk pocket squares and shiny buttons. Behind him, half-barrel-shaped leather armchairs sit in front of a fireplace flanked by headless mannequins in embroidered military coats and ruffled-front shirts. On one side of the hearth, there is a wall display of black Briggs umbrellas. (The top of the line, a very John Steed number with a whangee bamboo grip, will run you about $500.) Another rack holds a selection of shiny steel swords, available for rent or purchase, should one need to accessorize one’s velvet frock coat. Tucked in a corner is a Victorian jockey scale—a leather-seated contraption once used by Poole to discreetly settle disputes with customers who claimed not to have put on any weight since their last fitting.

The walls are covered with ornate frames holding warrants, yellowed with time, certifying that Poole was an official supplier to an international cast of royals, from Emperor Napoleon III to the Maharaja of Cooch Behar. Near the door, a small frame holds a canceled check written out to “Mr. Poole” and signed by Charles Dickens, who died in 1870, still owing the tailor money. Below that is a classic photograph of Winston Churchill wearing a bow tie, a black jacket, and striped pants. Henry Poole made formalwear for Churchill and many other dignitaries. In fact, as Angus Cundey is scheduled to explain, according to my Savile Row Field Day program, it was Henry Poole who invented the tuxedo.

“In 1865,” Cundey says to a group that has gathered around him, “the Prince of Wales was quite fed up with changing every
night into a dress coat. He wanted something more informal to wear at Sandringham, the royal family’s country estate.”

Henry Poole made the prince a short velvet smoking jacket that was, at the time, so daringly casual that it could be worn only within the confines of the country place.

“When a couple from Tuxedo Park, New York—a James and Cora Brown-Potter—was invited in 1886 to spend the weekend at the estate, Mr. Potter inquired what might be appropriate wear. It was suggested he get Henry Poole to make him a dinner jacket like the prince’s. So that’s what he did. After his visit, Mr. Potter went back to America with the jacket—but without his wife. She stayed behind in England to become an actress. The mind boggles.” Cundey pauses for his small audience to contemplate whether the garment was a fair trade for Mrs. Brown-Potter. “At any rate, when Mr. Potter wore his new short dinner jacket back in New York, the Tuxedo Club members and others who saw it were quite taken with it and started ordering their own. Hence the name.”

From Henry Poole, I head down the street to Huntsman, at 11 Savile Row. Leaning against a black-scrolled wrought-iron fence is the firm’s red Pashley courier bike, with a wicker hamper large enough to hold a new suit; it’s still used to make local deliveries. Inside, Peter Smith, the general manager, a large man with floppy brown bangs, is standing near a well-broken-in leather couch set across from a marble fireplace. Two large stag heads, in full antler, are mounted on the wall on either side of the mantel. The room feels like a cross between a private shooting lodge and the lobby of a Nottingham bank. I ask Smith about the heads.

“Ah, yes … well,” he says, looking delighted to have virgin ears for a story he must have told a thousand times. “In 1921, a customer came in and asked if we could hold on to them while he
went to lunch. And he never came back.” After six months of waiting, the tailor hung the stag heads on the wall.

It was serendipity for the shop, which by then was well established among royals and the tweedy hunt set as the place to get one’s riding garb. Fittings for pinks (scarlet equestrian coats) and patented seamless breeches were done in the back room astride a saddled wooden horse. Huntsman also became known for its use of bold plaid tweeds, woven exclusively for the firm in an ancient mill on Scotland’s Isle of Islay, and for its distinctive house style—one-button, sharp-shouldered, with a sculpted waist—borrowed from equestrianwear.

Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Gregory Peck, and Rex Harrison were all fans of the distinct cut. In the 1980s, Wall Street traders discovered that the Huntsman silhouette set off their yellow power ties nicely—and didn’t mind one bit that the firm was the most expensive tailor on Savile Row. (
Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s
The Bonfire of the Vanities
, was a Huntsman guy.) When Ridley Scott was making
Body of Lies
, he went looking for a wardrobe for the character of the debonair Jordanian intelligence chief played by Mark Strong. Huntsman showed him a cache of mid-1990s-era suits ordered and paid for by an Arab billionaire, who had died before he could pick them up. They were perfect.

I head back out on the street, where the tweed-clad shepherds are still urging their sheep up and down the corrals. My next stop is Gieves (that’s a hard
G
, please) & Hawkes, where, according to the Field Day program, a workshop tour is about to begin. The large store, which occupies the corner white Georgian town house at 1 Savile Row—once the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society—is the result of the merger of two successful tailors: Thomas Hawkes, a cap maker who opened for business
in 1771, and James Gieve, who took over a Portsmouth naval outfitter in 1852. Each made his mark with military and expedition garb, and each had a gift for innovation. Gieves, Ltd. patented the Life Saving Waist Coat, which featured a built-in inflatable device and a pocket for brandy, sagely presuming that one would require a drink if one found oneself in the drink. Hawkes & Co. invented the solar topee, a cork-lined pith helmet that became de rigueur Great White Hunter headgear. Henry Morton Stanley was sporting one when he discovered Dr. David Livingstone in Ugogo, Africa.

Andrew Goldberg, Gieves & Hawkes’s shiny-bald general manager, is gathering people for the tour. We follow him into the high-ceilinged atrium that had been the Royal Geographical Society’s map room and now houses the company’s ready-to-wear collection, and then through smaller rooms where pieces from the tailor’s archives are on display. There are gold-braid-trimmed Rear Admiral dress coats, RAF tunics, swan-feather-topped helmets, ostrich-plumed busbies, and Captain Bligh–style bicorne hats (Bligh himself was a customer). Glass cases display swords and aviator caps and dog-eared guides intended to help naval officers determine which of their dozen uniforms they should wear when. Among their choices: ball dress, ceremonial-blue undress, mess dress, and tropical mess undress—which, frankly, sounds like the most fun.

Goldberg leads the group single file down a narrow flight of stairs to the workroom, which is bright with natural light from a large window below street level. People on the sidewalk can peer down into the shop to see a dozen tailors at worktables cutting, sewing, and pressing.

“We have one individual concentrating on one aspect of each garment,” Goldberg says. “The buttonhole makers make
buttonholes. Waistcoat makers sew waistcoats. We have tailors down here who have made garments for the same person for thirty years and have never laid eyes on him.”

The tailors don’t need to see the customer, because, as in all bespoke establishments, he has been translated into two dimensions via measurements taken upstairs and transferred to paper patterns. Along one wall, I see hundreds of the brown-paper templates hanging from racks, at the ready for the day their owner comes back for a new suit or an overcoat. On each pattern, names are scrawled in black marker. The one closest to me reads “HRH Queen of Tonga.” I’m no expert, but even I can see that the queen’s pattern implies some serious girth.

Gieves & Hawkes has dressed hundreds of other royals, including King George III and even the King of Pop. Michael Jackson’s iconic gold-trimmed military jackets were sewn in this workroom. But most people who have clothes made here—or at the other bespoke tailors’—are not royalty. They are regular men (and some women)—maybe a little paunchy, maybe a little round in the shoulder—who are willing to pay almost any price in order to feel good in their clothes.

“It’s really not about the money,” Goldberg says. “Money is the trigger mechanism. What they are interested in is getting a suit that fits properly.”

I leave Gieves & Hawkes, on my way to Anderson & Sheppard, a tailoring firm that had been a fixture on Savile Row for nearly a century until 2005, when rising rents forced it to relocate to a smaller space on Old Burlington Street, one block away. As I cross the Row and pass the sheep enclosures, I smell warm hay and lanolin, and then, just before rounding the corner onto Burlington Gardens, I smell something else. It is a familiar, if hard-to-identify, scent—rosewood, maybe, with undernotes of fir and
Creamsicle. It triggers memories of being in crowded malls with my two teenage daughters—both giddy with the transformative promise of piqué cotton and distressed denim. Of course, I think, when I make the turn and see clusters of kids in hoodies checking their phones and holding shopping bags adorned with the black-and-white image of a chiseled naked male torso. It is the smell of Abercrombie & Fitch.

When Abercrombie & Fitch, the nineteenth-century American hunting-and-expedition outfitter turned purveyor of sexed-up teen casualwear, announced in 2005 that its first foray off North American soil would be in a nearly three-hundred-year-old mansion on the corner of Savile Row, there was a collective gasp from the longtime tenants of the neighborhood.

“I admit to being horrified,” Henry Poole’s Angus Cundey told me.

For a year and a half, as the building’s 18,000-square-foot interior was revamped to suit its new tenants, Cundey and his colleagues had to walk past a two-story construction wall plastered with the retailer’s signature Olympian pecs and abs. The former Queensberry House—later home to a branch of the Bank of England and then a Jil Sander boutique—was a tricky space. The bright lights and white walls of Sander’s minimalist showroom had to be scrapped, and the former bank vaults had to be converted into shadowy nooks for T-shirts and jeans. The walls along the grand staircase had to be hung with Mark Beard’s giant faux-vintage portraits of half-naked, well-muscled sportsmen, and the twenty-seven-foot-high ceilings, which would have reverbed the A&F house music into aural mud, had to be compensated for with 125 strategically placed speakers. Once the army of beautiful young sales help was hired and the moose heads were hung and the atomizers were primed to pump out Fierce Room Spray,
the store’s signature vaporous catnip, the store was ready for its March 22, 2007, opening.

Two hundred people stood in the cold rain that day, in a line that snaked down Savile Row. They could probably hear the driving techno beat as they waited their turn to walk through the stone-columned entranceway, past the two shirtless male greeters in faded low-slung jeans who flanked the door. Once they were inside, and had allowed their eyes to adjust to the cavelike darkness, they would be free to fill their arms with $100 polo shirts and $200 jeans. And, for a short time, they would feel that they had been granted membership in an exclusive club where teeth were straight and white, and bodies were toned and depilatoried into sculptural perfection.

The eager customers came the next day, and the next, and the next. Lines for the dressing rooms were sometimes forty-five minutes long. Buoyed by its success in the U.K., Abercrombie, which had reached saturation point in the lackluster American market, would soon build stores in Paris, Madrid, Singapore, Brussels, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Hamburg, Munich, Düsseldorf, Hong Kong, and Milan.

After the initial shock, the tailors of Savile Row tried to look for the upside. The store was certainly bringing new foot traffic to the area. Perhaps, one day, Abercrombie & Fitch customers would be ready to ditch their baggy jeans—and they would know where to go. After all, hadn’t Mike Jeffries, Abercrombie’s flip-flop-wearing CEO, come to Norton & Sons to be fitted for a bespoke suit?

“
People who are going to go into Abercrombie & Fitch aren’t going to come in to see us,” Barry Tulip, Gieves & Hawkes’s design director, told a
British GQ
reporter. “But we do want them to look into the window and say, ‘Crikey, that’s amazing! As soon as
I’ve got rid of my hankering for Abercrombie, I’m going to grow up and come to Gieves.’ ”

I make my way past the groups milling around outside Abercrombie & Fitch and round the corner to Anderson & Sheppard. Inside, a hushed front room glows with an amber light, as if viewed through a glass of sherry. The butternut walls, the parquet floors, the etchings of hounds, the half-shaded wall sconces illuminating the nougat-colored marble fireplace—they are all enough to make me want to lie down on the leather couch, put my feet up, and dive into a book about topiary or tea cozies. On tables near the large-paned front window, ledger books have been left open to pages with handwritten orders from Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Duke Ellington, and Fred Astaire—all devotees of Anderson & Sheppard’s easy, soft-shouldered suits.