Huntsman changes hands

[Manself]

Newsflash! According to the fashion news service Diary Daily (9 January 2012):

"Huntsman, the Savile Row bespoke tailor founded in 1849, has announced Bond Street designer and couturier Roubi L’Roubi as its new Creative Director and Co-owner. Roubi is a London designer who is renowned for his tailoring and dressmaking. In the US, he is a member of the Costume Guild of Hollywood; actress Zoe Saldana will wear period creations for her starring role in the forthcoming film about the life of singer Nina Simone. Huntsman's in-house team at the shop, cutting room and workshops on 11 Savile Row, offer bespoke, made to measure and ready-to-wear. Huntsman is now under the co-ownership of Roubi L’Roubi and his business partner, Pierre Lagrange (pictured above).

“I am proud and privileged to be able to uphold the tradition of supreme craftsmanship which has distinguished Huntsman for more than 160 years,” Mr L’ Roubi said.

http://www.roubi.eu/

[Rob O]

Sounds like there's some synergy between the two companies. Best of luck to them.

[davidhuh]

Now it will be interesting to see what happens to Budd

[andreyb]

Why I'm not thrilled?

Andrey

[alden]

Makes me think if these ill fated words

"Unlike Balzac we are fortunate to live in a time when the "nouveau riches" worship brands, labels, and logos. As such we are lucky not to find many of them in our tailor's ateliers though Balzac, poor fellow, would certainly have seen the lot of them in his."

Study of Elegance Part II

Hiss....!

Michael

[st.tully]

Now it will be interesting to see what happens to Budd

Budd is not part of the sale. It will remain with the former Huntsman owners. Let us hope this is good news. Budd is an absolute gem!

[Noble Savage]

Looks like Huntsman a diffusion line is in the works.

[davidhuh]

Now it will be interesting to see what happens to Budd

Budd is not part of the sale. It will remain with the former Huntsman owners. Let us hope this is good news. Budd is an absolute gem!

Dear St. Tully,

I got that. I raise the point because I realised that Budd did rather well under the new ownership (a part from the silly refurbishment), and this was not only but also due to some synergies with Huntsman.

cheers, David

[dempsy444]

Things are getting very confusing at Huntsman. This new person is now "creative director" while Huntsman also has a partnership with Alexander McQueen and maintains a traditional mens bespoke line that is a member of the SRBA, which seems to take pride in being above the whims of fashion.

[stephenm]

I understand the commercial need for these changes of ownership, but it does concern me that the old spirit of Savile Row is disappearing: Huntsman with new ownership and collaborations with fashion houses; Norton & Sons spending a lot of time on E Tautz; Gieves & Hawkes now in new hands. I hope we don't get 10 years down the road when the old hands such as Haste and Kent have retired, and the traditional houses are an endangered species.

[Sir Royston]

Oh dear!!!

[Frederic Leighton]

From the Evening Standard of today (read online):

Want to saddle up in style? Pierre Lagrange and Roubi L’Roubi are your guys. As owners of a Savile Row tailor they are living the brand with unbridled enthusiasm, says Charlotte Edwardes.

Pierre Lagrange and Roubi L’Roubi, co-owners of historic Savile Row tailors Hunstman, are telling me about their “country lifestyle” which revolves around a Berkshire pile where they host “shooting dinners and weekend parties” where guests dress with “outlandish eccentricity” in “velvet smoking jackets of absolutely absurd colours”, “bright shooting stockings” and “smoking shoes”.

They collect vintage cars — “E-Types, Aston Martins, Bentleys” — and art — “walls of it” — and shoot “English game” with “Holland & Holland 20-bores”. Seven thoroughbreds, a pony, two Bengals and two Hungarian Vizslas live with them. The Tamworth pigs and some “rare” sheep were recently sold but they are “on the hunt” for a gun dog. “Our animals are all pure breeds,” L’Roubi reassures me.

The reason they are telling me all this, L’Roubi explains in his languid drawl, is so that I understand how “relevant” their “private life” is to Huntsman. “Rather than just owning the brand, we have a connection,” he explains. “It’s our lifestyle.” The Huntsman aesthetic, the dream, the tawny adverts of dashing blades in oak-panelled libraries, “is our actual life,” he says. “A lot of people don’t know that.”

What they may know is that Lagrange, 52, who has the rugged looks of a Seventies ski instructor, is the celebrated Belgian-born co-founder of GLG Partners and worth at least £350 million. His private life became sorely public when he left his wife Catherine Anspach and three children in a record-breaking £160 million separation four years ago, and moved in with 45-year-old L’Roubi, a Sudanese-born stylist and tailor who has worked “on the Row” for most of his career. They bought Huntsman last year and installed L’Roubi as “fashion designer and creative director”.

He’s breathing life back into the company’s archives, this month curating 160 of Hollywood actor Gregory Peck’s suits for an exhibition. We’re here to discuss Peck but we end up on their definition of “Britishness” — a sort of “new” Brideshead that’s more anglophile plutocrat than Anglo-Saxon aristocrat.

We move from the shop (with sofas so pouffed, you’re still sinking five minutes after sitting) to 42° Raw, the Royal Academy café nearby. Lagrange leaps in to buy me coffee — “I insist!” — spilling his money over the counter. He’s all energy in a natty check and loafers. L’Roubi, meanwhile, strikes angular poses like a catalogue model in charcoal grey.

“British upper-class fashion is about individuality,” L’Roubi says. “What we are wearing today is sombre but people wear tweeds and shooting stockings so bright that you’d never wear in the city, and that’s where the character comes out, in the high life.

“For shooting or riding we don’t dress in our suits, that’s for work in London. If you’re relaxing it’s jeans and a blazer. We’re chameleons; in a week you can wear very different things.” Lagrange adds, “Leather trousers, especially plus fours, can only be worn for shooting, otherwise you look like an alien.”

I’m not sure Lagrange has a clue about clothes but he’s jolly nice, taking questions head on, even when I ask if it’s better from a woman’s point of view to be left for another man or a younger, prettier woman. “It’s never easy,” he answers. “Every situation is difficult. That we’re amicable is down to my ex-wife, my kids and Roubi — I am only one of the wheels.”

He douses everything he says in self-deprecation: “I shoot, though I’m not too good”; “We’re both engineers but Roubi is mechanical and I am chemical, so he’s smarter”; “My success is down to talented teams”; “Roubi is a wonderful painter, I’m only a collector.”

As for L’Roubi, he interrupts his boyfriend and addresses me at least half a dozen times with the curious precursor “With respect” until the milk in my coffee begins to curdle. They first met at a MOMA exhibition of abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, whose works sell for upwards of £1 million, and in Berkshire Motherwell’s painting hangs close to L’Roubi’s own work.

“It’s interesting that his art is so similar to mine,” L’Roubi says. “I never learned about Motherwell but his style and mine are so similar it’s uncanny. What is also relevant,” he continues, raising his voice to be heard over an expulsion of steam from the coffee machine, “is that the year our Motherwell was painted was the year I came to England.”

Lagrange grew up in Ohain, Belgium, where his father worked as an architect and his mother owned a gift shop. He worked at JP Morgan in Brussels before “Goldman Sachs offered me a very good job in London”.

Investment banking and Savile Row are not so different, he observes. “A lot of prima donnas — because people are very good at their jobs.” He places emphasis on “teams” and on keeping them intact — some families have worked at Huntsman for generations.

“Huntsman has actual heritage, a legacy,” L’Roubi says. “Starting with Queen Victoria. I love it because it’s real. It’s not made up like some modern tailors. So if we’re shooting or riding, I know this tailoring house has been making clothes for people doing exactly that going back generations. It’s relevant.”

L’Roubi is working on a collection that draws from the firm’s roots in equestrian wear. “Henry Huntsman made his name around riding breeches,” he says. “Did you know that?”

His designs include “riding pants” and saddles, and he’s designed “entire outfits, caps and everything” for a Huntsman-sponsored Polo team. “But it’s not a costume drama,” L’Roubi says, and then spoils the denial by telling me that when he rides everything is “crisp and freshly pressed”.

“I love a cotton shirt, with long sleeves for when you’re stretching with reins,” he poses as if on a horse, “a quilted waistcoat that’s absorbing, and a watch with a big dial that you can read from a distance.” A riding watch? “It sounds silly but it’s very important. This one is Cartier. You can read it from here,” he demonstrates, “and work out the warming-up time.”

He drops that he’s back from Highclere, “home” of Downton Abbey. “I was there at the stud. I have seven horses from the one that was in the Olympic dressage.” He recently bought a German-bred stallion that is “one of the most important horses in the world, called H. Equador. It’s a Holsteiner.”

The boys love a brand. In addition to branded animals, guns and watches, they have branded friends, such as Matthew Vaughn and Claudia Schiffer, Bryan Adams and Ben Goldsmith. And branded anecdotes, like the one about how the chairman of ICI was a client and brought nylon to the shop — “so [Huntsman] made the first nylon trousers, including a pair for Liz Taylor”.

Huntsman’s former clients do make an impressive list — everyone from Sir Winston Churchill to the Rolling Stones and Lucian Freud. “The cutters have extraordinary memories of going to [Freud’s] studio in the middle of the night,” Lagrange says. “He’d be washing his brushes and flicking them like this on the wall next to expensive fabrics.

“He had an amazing eye for fabrics. What better judge of quality than an artist well-known for nuance and truth in terms of colour?” Lagrange doesn’t own a Freud, “sadly”, but he once spent $17 million on a Jackson Pollock forgery. Was that the only fake he’s bought? He laughs. “Hopefully.”

L’Roubi wants to talk about Berkshire again. “We love the countryside,” he says. “It’s a big part of living in England. That’s why we love it here. Land should not only be used for shooting — shooting is seasonal,” he says.

Does he hunt? “I find hunting a little irrelevant. First it’s illegal. And to hunt without [a fox] is a little weird, running around on the horses pretending. I prefer eventing.”

Then Lagrange says there are some “absolutely God-forsaken places” in the country too. I suspect, as the only one of us with an unheated English childhood, that this is the country I know, a long way from the sprawling boundaries of the Lagrange-L’Roubi estate.

[Luca]

Why would the owners of a prestigious tailoring house want to look like vagrants?

[Russell]

Thanks for that Frederic

If I was one to eat breakfast I’d have disgorged it by now.

When old Rubio took over Huntsman I had a look at the website relating to his existing Oxford Street fashion enterprise – including the ‘country clothing’. What was on display was a very poor harbinger for Huntsman.

I’ve shot since I was a boy & I wince at the thought of some of the people who get involved in the sport.

Well it could have been worse – they could have bought out your German clavichord maker – built a ‘brand’ out of him; introduced their own ‘slant’ on the fretting pattern & be holding extravagant country house clavichord recital evenings where the two of them bash out a tune dressed in period costume (by Huntsman of course).

Regards
Russell

[Frederic Leighton]

Well it could have been worse – they could have bought out your German clavichord maker – built a ‘brand’ out of him; introduced their own ‘slant’ on the fretting pattern & be holding extravagant country house clavichord recital evenings where the two of them bash out a tune dressed in period costume (by Huntsman of course).

thank you for that, Russell! I'll make sure to keep a cyanide pill in the waistband pocket of my trousers. Just in case...