House of Nutter Read online

  Westminster City Council are to be recommended by their Car Parking Committee to approve a scheme for a multi-storey garage in a building to be erected on the site of 33–39, Savile Row, and 3–9, Old Burlington Street. The building would also provide shops, showrooms, offices, and flats.

  …A compulsory purchase order for the site awaits confirmation by the Minister of Transport.

  None of the tailors seemed to go out of business because of the compulsory purchase order, or not exactly. Samuel Cundey, the owner of Henry Poole & Co., was deeply shocked and never quite the same afterward. “To see the family inheritance being bulldozed…upset him no end,” his son and heir, Angus Cundey, once recalled. But the company gathered its stock and employees and shifted slightly over to Cork Street, where it soon resumed a nimble trade. Meanwhile, G. Ward & Co., also slated for demolition, combined its resources with another tailor’s to become Donaldson, Williams & G. Ward, which popped up so quickly in the stately Burlington Arcade (just 370 feet from Savile Row) that there was barely a hiccup in trading.

  Donaldson, Williams & G. Ward was located in the north end of Burlington Arcade.

  And yet it is difficult not to read the parking-garage imbroglio as a kind of sign—a sign of the industry’s decline, perhaps, that had been creeping on since before the war. Savile Row was succumbing to senescence in a furiously modernizing world, figuratively and now literally. Later, Tommy would describe the brief flash he spent at No. 35 as “the very end of the Golden Age,” adding, because he could rarely help himself: “Either I finished it off or it was already in its death throes.”

  * * *

  The so-called golden age of Savile Row arguably began in 1860, exactly a hundred years before Tommy turned up on the doorstep asking for a job. One evening in London, the Prince of Wales attended the performance of a play about Robert Macaire, an archetypal villain and con man. While sitting in the audience, the prince noticed that the actor playing Macaire was wearing “a mass of rents and patches” that seemed, the closer he looked, to be an incredibly well cut mass of rents and patches.

  The prince was Prince Edward, son of Victoria and Albert, later King Edward VII, though his family just called him Bertie. He had a discriminating eye, and at the end of the play he summoned the actor, Charles Fechter, to inquire which tailor happened to be responsible for producing his raffish adventurer’s coat. Fechter said it was “Poole.”

  Before Bertie elevated Henry Poole to the position of his chief tailor, fine British tailoring had subsisted since the days of Beau Brummell on a trade of aristocratic dress and military uniforms. James Gieves and Thomas Hawkes, for example, had once kitted out Admiral Lord Nelson and Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington; during the recent Crimean War, Gieves had even filled a yacht with tailoring supplies and sailed off to the Black Sea to make a fortune dressing British naval officers between battles.

  But the Prince of Wales’s patronage represented something new for bespoke tailoring, and for Savile Row particularly. Here was a young man who adored clothes—too much, in the opinion of his father, who allegedly complained that “even when out shooting, he is more occupied with his trousers than with the game!” When he traveled abroad, Prince Edward packed more than forty suits and twenty pairs of shoes. He took two valets to keep everything in order and left more behind to tend to the rest of a wardrobe that was, by some accounts, the largest in the world: “the robes of nine British and fifty foreign orders of chivalry, a complete set of uniforms of every British regiment and plenty of foreign ones besides, plus enough civilian wear to satisfy a man who was pleased to change his dress five or six times a day.”

  The prince was not afraid of ordering novelties when he visited the Row. In 1865, he decided he was tired of changing every night into full tails at Sandringham, so asked Henry Poole to contrive an easier alternative. The result—a short celestial-blue smoking jacket with silk-satin facings—would one day become known as the dinner jacket, and later “tuxedo,” after a copy (or so the popular theory goes) caused a stir at the Tuxedo Club in New York in 1886.

  Among numerous other design follies, Bertie introduced two-piece velvet suits for wear in country houses. He took to wearing loose, waist-banded Norfolk jackets, Homburg felt hats, and Tyrolean hats with a feather. He had an Inverness cape—the kind now associated with Sherlock Holmes—crafted in silk-lined black, which he wore like an opera cloak, thereby breaching the age-old boundary between sportswear and more decorous kinds of dress. He also popularized white waistcoats for wear with dark dress-coats: the penguin look. One story has him spilling spinach down his starched front during a dinner at Buckingham Palace; instead of exploding with anger, he just laughed, let Queen Alexandra have a go at scraping it off, then dipped a napkin in the green purée and proceeded to develop the blotch into a fully realized illustration. Clothing, for Bertie, was both a serious fixation and a delightful game.

  It is because of him that no gentleman today fastens the bottom button on a waistcoat. He once forgot, and soon everybody began “forgetting.” Indeed, Prince Edward’s innovations, deliberate or otherwise, were duly adopted by refined society across the Continent. In Marienbad, which he enjoyed visiting annually, tailors from Paris and Vienna would trail him like journalists, taking notes on his new outfits so they could report back to their rich clientele. In this way, he became an international arbiter of men’s style; as King Edward VII, he would become an icon, lending his name to a whole era.

  Because Edwardian style was largely realized on Savile Row, the reputation of its tailors soared for several decades. Edward would bespeak it; Savile Row would make it; everybody else would follow, flocking to Mayfair in a long line of Russian luminaries, American magnates, maharajas, entrepreneurs, lords, hoteliers, and politicians. As the Duke of Windsor once wrote, “He was a good friend to the tailors of Savile Row, consolidating the position of London as the international sartorial shrine for men, as already Paris was for women.”

  King Edward VII died in 1910. Then the First World War took its toll, which included many from the next generation of wealthy gentlemen. For Savile Row, the short-term rush of military orders kept them afloat—some tailors were stretched beyond capacity during the conflict—and then afterward, at least in part, by the earnest efforts of yet another Prince of Wales.

  Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David shared his grandfather’s almost fetishistic attraction to clothes. (King George V, coming in between them, not so much.) Like Bertie before him, Edward was said to travel with an astonishing number of trunks: at least forty, carefully guarded by his devoted valet. When it came to Savile Row, he was not afraid of innovation either, bespeaking new and dazzling things in response to what he saw as grotesque “constrictions of dress” thrust upon him by “rigid social convention.” Edward’s preference was for comfort and freedom. He had zippers installed in his trousers—a controversial development in the history of royal pants. When he was alone, he peeled off layers and rolled up his shirtsleeves, a process the future duchess would come to describe as his “striptease act.” He tried unlined jackets and sport coats, and lounge suits in a new drape cut devised by his genius, mercurial tailor, Frederick Scholte. He rebelled against “the tyranny of starch,” then wrote about it in his book, as though a great evil had finally been eradicated from the British Isles.

  Edward was acutely aware of what his stature meant for the international preeminence of Savile Row. “I was in fact ‘produced’ as a leader of fashion,” he later explained,

  with the clothiers as my showmen and the world as my audience. The middle-man in this process was the photographer, employed not only by the Press but by the trade, whose task it was to photograph me on every possible occasion, public or private, with an especial eye for what I happened to be wearing. A selection of these photographs, together with patterns of materials and samples of collars, ties, socks, waistcoats, and so forth,
was immediately rushed to America, where overnight a new fashion might well be born—to the considerable advantage of the British export trade.

  Also in America, Hollywood had begun dressing its idols (see: Clark Gable) in Savile Row bespoke, thereby offering the tailors another boost through association with the romantic silver screen. Indeed, between Hollywood and Edward, it could have gone on for years in an endless procession of backless vests, soft shirts, and tailcoats so brilliantly made you could tap-dance across a soundstage in them. But then came two inconvenient twists.

  In January 1936, upon the death of his father, Edward ascended the throne to become King Edward VIII. Eleven months later, following a constitutional crisis, he abdicated to marry a divorcee from Pennsylvania named Wallis Simpson. This decision scandalized the country, and Edward immediately lost his luster as a sartorial standard-bearer. Prince Charming had strayed, suddenly and irretrievably, into the wilderness.

  Then, of course, there was the Second World War.

  Savile Row workshops were incinerated during the Blitz; a land mine vaporized ten entire firms. Tailors scattered, seeking shelter under one another’s roof, but the general attitude was resilience. The historian Richard Walker tells the tale of one secretary who “placed her typewriter on some debris and tapped out orders on her knees in the street.”

  The shakiness set in afterward, like post-traumatic stress disorder. The causes for this were myriad: a government-mandated rationing of cloth, which made it illegal to order things like pleats, cuffs, or decorative buttons; “demob” suits issued to all demobilizing servicemen, many of whom decided to make do with what they were given; the further annihilation of an aristocratic class; and a generational break between fathers and sons, who once would have inherited their tailors as a family tradition.

  Like everyone else, Savile Row tailors turned to the Americans for salvation. “During the war,” explains Angus Cundey, “American servicemen used to come and order from us [at Henry Poole], and afterwards they would come and order civilian suits while they were waiting to return home from the RAF or army camps. Subsequent to that, we used to go over [to] visit them to encourage repeat business, steaming across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, sometimes for five weeks at a time.”

  Tailors on the Row began to search for a new champion closer to home, a man who could conjure up fresh styles and then incite longing for them on the world stage: that is, the next Prince Edward. (No contenders were forthcoming.) Savile Row also took the unprecedented step of forming a Men’s Fashion Council, made up of representatives from a handful of the most powerful firms: something like the UN Security Council, but for menswear. If no ideal spokesman could be found, Savile Row would perform the role by committee. “We’d get round a table and say, ‘This year we’re going to do turn-ups; next year will be waistcoats,’ ” recalls Angus Cundey. “We’d be determining the fashion, effectively. Then you’d get headlines in The Times: SAVILE ROW SAYS TURN-UPS ARE IN.” The Men’s Fashion Council was criticized for “sitting in secret,” though its suggestions were dutifully adopted by middle-class stores along the high streets.

  Eventually the council went so far as to begin hosting fashion shows at the Savoy, each single-breasted suit revealed to journalists “as though it came from Chanel or Molyneux.” However, because many tailors had developed an almost pathological aversion to publicity—they saw publicity as vulgar—these parades remained largely self-defeating, though they went on for years. “The exasperating thing about these shows is the group insistence on total anonymity,” one journalist would complain. “You may admire a suit, topcoat or jacket, but nobody will disclose who made it.”

  Still, the Men’s Fashion Council did experience at least one success at playing tastemaker in the years after the war. At the start of the 1950s, some upper-class youngsters began to sense the privilege eroding from beneath their feet and responded by adopting a distinctive style that evoked the halcyon days of King Edward VII, when supremacy of the aristocracy seemed all but assured. Savile Row was only too happy to assist in what amounted to a grand act of wishful thinking, and the product was neo-Edwardian brocade waistcoats, slim-cut overcoats with velvet collars and cuffs. Steeped in nostalgia, these clothes were popular among ex–Guards officers and members of the elite—the kind, say, who dreamed of valets to accompany their own extensive luggage on a tour of the Continent.

  Sometime around 1953, a small but conspicuous gang of British working-class youths hijacked the neo-Edwardian look and car-crashed it into an American zoot suit, “the garb of ghetto rebellion.” The product, handcrafted by less discerning (and less expensive) tailors than those on Savile Row, was deranged. The youths became known as Teddy Boys (from Edwardian), and they took their new uniforms very seriously. Those slim-cut overcoats suddenly appeared on the streets in maroon, black, or pale blue, now even longer and paired with tight, suggestive drainpipe trousers. Slim Jim ties were held in place by medallions, skulls-and-crossbones, tiny Texas longhorns, or maybe a silver dollar. Bright-colored socks were worn high on the ankles and left exposed above crêpe-soled shoes called “brothel creepers.” Meanwhile, the Teds massaged so much Brylcreem into their hair that it became almost sculptural, funneling down over the forehead like an elephant’s trunk or swept back and peaked like the tail of a duck. For maintenance, they used steel-toothed combs, channeling Elvis or James Dean by way of South London.

  Where had they come from, these disgruntled young men? (“The lack of parental authority during the war?” asked George Melly, who was still mystified more than a decade later. “The breakdown of the working-class family as a strong social unit…? The effect of the bombing? Regret that the war was over too early to allow them to release their aggression under risk?”) Whatever the catalyst for the Teds, the moralistic media quickly affiliated them with delinquency and violence, even murder. And in this hysterical narrative the neo-Edwardian style now came to function as an unsettling set of semaphore flags: the look signaled sexual energy, an aggressive hunger for change. Teds had kidnapped a benign (if conceited) bespoke style, vandalized its meaning, and then made their vision fashionable among a group of marginalized kids who shared an open disdain for the establishment. In doing so, they signaled the emergence of an entirely new demographic in Britain, otherwise known as the modern teenager.

  Savile Row was appalled.

  Instantly, the neo-Edwardian look was abandoned, as were most other attempts at fashionable innovation. Instead of setting the agenda, tailors retreated to conservatism; they dug their heels even harder into the past. Determined to survive by avoiding risk, they closely adhered to what Pearl Binder, writing in 1958, would call “the exquisitely prosaic city suit”—a sober, anonymous outfit of gray or navy blue that could “press to perfection the man whose mission in life is to make money.”

  On Savile Row, almost anything flamboyant became taboo.

  * * *

  In the handful of years after Tommy migrated with Donaldson, Williams & G. Ward into the Burlington Arcade and earth-movers set upon a great swathe of Savile Row’s western flank, articles began to appear in the popular press that added up to a kind of eulogy.

  “As far as setting men’s fashion goes,” the Daily Mail declared in one characteristic example, “the mods have taken over.” The paper continued, “There’s been no violence. Savile-row [sic] hasn’t been put to fire and sword, just quietly elbowed aside by a lot of under-20’s with tiny pointed heads and suede bootees. Savile-row goes on producing beautiful clothes, timeless and built to last for ever. But the gimmicks, the bright ideas and new styles which make fashion fizz are produced by and for the mods…”

  A similar sentiment was soon expressed by Cecil Beaton in the pages of Vogue: “It is ridiculous that they go on turning out clothes that make men look like characters from P. G. Wodehouse. I’m terribly bored with their styling—so behind the times. They really should pay attention to the fashion produced by the
young mods…the barriers are down and everything goes. Savile Row has got to reorganize itself and, to coin a banal phrase, get with it.” Soon enough the journalist Nik Cohn would be likening Savile Row to “some deposed Slavic princeling, once despotic but now made humble, reduced to chauffeur or cinema commissionaire.” It was something to be humored, Cohn suggested—“cherished” was the word he used—with all the condescension of a young man talking to his friends about an embarrassing uncle.

  Tommy sympathized with these kinds of sentiments at the time they were written. Now a few years into his apprenticeship, he was beginning to feel ambivalent, even frustrated, by Savile Row’s insistent close-mindedness. “Although I actually loved the clothing and the tradition,” he later explained, “I was always a bit of a rebel.” On several occasions, he tested the boundaries of acceptability by turning up to work wearing a bright tie or outrageous pocket handkerchief, only to find himself banished from public view by an apoplectic boss.

  There is no question that Tommy respected his tailoring colleagues. Yet in the early 1960s, he was also one of those “under-20’s with tiny pointed heads and suede bootees.” London had started to move with a strange new rhythm, as seductive as it was seemingly democratic; if Savile Row refused to move an inch in Mayfair—well, Tommy would dance on the sly in the dingy maze of Soho.

  This created a sharp tension in his life. During the day, he went about his duties in the Burlington Arcade, remaining respectful and attentive except for the occasional outburst of insolent playfulness. At night and on weekends, however, he joined those teenage insurrectionists who were supposedly undermining the very place where he’d staked his future prosperity. He was like a double-agent, working at cross-purposes, and the outcome was probably inevitable, as Tommy would be the first to recognize: “I was moving right away from all the stiffness of Savile Row.”