Sat Oct 10, 2009 7:29 pm
I certainly don't disagree with much (if anything) said in this thread. Surely, though, it comes down to a lack of awareness and education in potential customers - generally intelligent and well-off youngsters - who just don't take the time to learn anything that is not geared to their bank accounts - and whose minds are not directed to learn anything - about the best material things that they could get to enhance their lives?
I recall a time when, most of my suits were not readily accessible to me and I had torn the trousers of a fine mohair Davies & Son suit, so I sent them to be invisibly mended and made do with a remaining much less good suit for the time that the repair took. I clearly remember receiving it back; immediately changing into it and feeling the difference: it didn't just fit where it touched; it was an outer shell of me - and I heard again the cutter's voice as he had called out my skeletal and bodily peculiarities - "drop on the left shoulder; prominent calves..." - other deficiencies of my person (no doubt encoded so that I was not offended); his re-measuring my legs "inside leg 32.5 inches - "that can't be right" - looking at my (then) spare five feet ten inch height (it was right) - and all the rest of it - several hours of my time alone - let alone theirs; my deciding on the specifics and the cloth, the lining, the buttons, then the fittings - and all the rest of it; taking it home; wearing it; the envious scorn of some of my friends; ripping it; having it restored and returned and, that same evening, being complimented by someone on it. I still have the coat and vest; the trousers did not outlive the rest and I mourn them still.
Now, some in 'the Row' are dragging factory stuff out of the boxes and shoving it on hangers and the customers are queuing up to buy it because - hey - "See the label" - flash open the coat "Yeah, it's Savile Row - bought it this afternoon, in between a meeting and a game of squash". Well, I'm sorry - but it isn't.
But the lack of awareness and education of potential customers is mirrored or encouraged (it is difficult to say which) by the desuetude of pride in a job well-done and a lack of foresight in what this means by some of the custodians of the skills involved in what we admire. If the reality is that they are going to start passing-off mass-produced RTW, made in a factory out of town, for the Real Thing and, for a time, no one notices that the prices are, more or less, the same, then, of course, because the profit margins in RTW are, probably much greater (at the same price per piece), bespoke will become a thing of the past.
I think that the answer mainly lies in education of the future potential customers as much as anything. If they started going in and saying: "What have you got for me between £2000-£3000, the honest answer, at least for the time-being, has to be:
"Well, sir, we have our latest line of factory-produced cat-walk-cut crap over here - [gesturing with a sneer] - or, [smiling], we can give you: the bees' knees; make you look like the cat's whiskers; have you dressed to the nines, sir, fully bespoke, in a very decent merino worsted, for, let me see - ah, yes - £2,550 plus VAT - unless you live outside the EU - and then we can drop the tax - but you can't have it today, sir. This will take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, sir, and neither are our suits. Now, would you just please sign our book?" Of course, he turns away from the clothes on the rail and, of course, he signs the book. He's just become: James Bond; Fred Astaire; Cary Grant; Ray Milland; Clive Brook; Rudolph Valentino; he's stepping in the footsteps of Brummell - and it is good. It is very good.
So it comes down to a combination of the need for education and information for the potential customers and a recognition by the businesses that well informed customers are not going to fall for the Armani-type 'lines' about the incomparable and supreme merits of cloth made from a nearly extinct sub-species of wild Kashmiri goat; pinching crocodile shoes and man-bags.
But we have to face the fact that the shops that we have enjoyed visiting are no more going to include many that are havens of slightly dusty, sherry-scented, tweedy fustiness, decorated with too many fading, old framed Warrants; places of turmoil and of unrushed, gentle industry - because, in any event, they are all fighting to survive in a society that has not (in my opinion and to say the least), improved very much - from over twenty years ago.
If anything is to be saved, the firms need to find PR companies that can evoke a gentle wistfulness for the light that is fading, with some guts and punch and thump against the forces that threaten to snuff it out.
NJS