Crisis on Savile Row: can British tailoring survive the impact of Covid-19?

[davidhuh]

Gentlemen, this was published in The Telegraph, September 10.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/mens ... act-covid/

As there is a paywall, I paste it here.

Crisis on Savile Row: can British tailoring survive the impact of Covid-19?

Savile Row has been the last word in bespoke suiting for centuries, but it now faces an existential crisis


When, in those gloomy days of March, the lockdown first gripped Britain, Savile Row became a hive of feverish activity.

At Dege & Skinner, Henry Poole and Anderson & Sheppard - tailoring establishments that between them can count more than 300 years of Savile Row history - the story was the same: as the doors to the street's august establishments slammed shut, vans and taxis were commandeered to deliver irons, sewing machines and boards for the tailors and makers, usually labouring in the basements and back rooms of the Row, to continue working from home.

At Anderson & Sheppard, the light in the shop was kept burning by one of the firm's senior cutters, Leon Powell, who would come in each day to keep things ticking over. The Row, he says, was dead. "Once or twice you might see a figure lurking in the back of a shop, but it was very eerie, the entire area."

In the brighter days of July, shortly after the government announcement that shops could open again, I took a walk down Savile Row, past the immaculate shopfronts, with their elegant twisted metal railings, the tailored suits and jackets on dummies standing to attention behind windows embossed with gold lettering.

Like the entirety of London's West End, it was all but deserted. The tailors of Savile Row do not depend on walk-in business. Few people strolling down the street feel seized with the compulsion suddenly to order a bespoke suit; but any street needs people, a sense of busy-ness, to come alive. One could only wonder when, if, they would return.

Gieves & Hawkes, at number one Savile Row, can trace its roots back to 1771, when Thomas Hawkes set up a tailor's shop in nearby Brewer Street; it moved to Savile Row in 1912. Henry Poole & Co, at number 15, was established in 1846, when Henry took over the business from his father James, who had been a volunteer soldier in the Napoleonic wars and, like all volunteers, was expected to make his own uniform, so became a tailor. Dege & Skinner, at number 10, was founded in 1865.

But the Covid crisis has hit Savile Row in all manner of ways, presenting a threat to its very survival. How can the best bespoke tailoring in the world - everybody agrees on that - survive in a world where people have less money to spend, are unable to travel and where the very meaning of bespoke is challenged by the new conventions of social distancing?

The relationship between a tailor and his or her client is as familiar as that between a lady and her hairdresser. "You can't do bespoke tailoring by Zoom," says Colin Heywood, the managing director of Anderson & Sheppard. "The customer has to come in and engage, eye to eye, and see the processes and have a dialogue."

And, of course, be measured up - although that is the least of the problems. Tailors now come dressed with masks, visors and gloves. "You still need to get inside that two-metre distance," Heywood says, "but the idea is to minimise the frequency and the duration."

A lot of measuring - sleeve lengths, shoulders, across the back, coat length (Savile Row does not talk about 'jackets') - is done from the back. For fittings, the customer puts on the coat and trousers. "It's observed from a distance," Heywood says. "When you need to pin or mark you do it at arm's length, and quickly."

The bigger problems facing Savile Row are economic ones. With premises shut, firms have been able partly to fulfil existing orders, but new ones have been few. The lockdown happened at exactly the period when people would normally be ordering suits for Ascot, weddings and their summer wardrobe.

Then there is the foreign trade. A large proportion of revenue on Savile Row - more than 60 per cent in the case of some firms - comes from foreign customers, and most tailors do 'trunk shows', travelling to America and the Far East for sales and fittings, which restrictions on travel have made impossible.

In a normal year, the salesmen and cutters of Anderson & Sheppard make four trips to America. "We'd come back with 80 orders from our first trip, and another 40 from Asia and a second US trip. Those have gone," says Anda Rowland, who owns the firm.

Founded in 1906, Anderson & Sheppard arrived on Savile Row in 1915, catering to customers including Fred Astaire, Cole Porter, Noël Coward, countless crown princes, millionaires, film moguls, the Prince of Wales - and Marlene Dietrich.

Anda's father was the late businessman and newspaper proprietor Tiny Rowland, a long-time customer of Anderson & Sheppard, who liked its suits so much he invested in it, eventually acquiring 80 per cent of the company. Tiny Rowland died in 1998, and in 2004 Anda took over the running of the business on behalf of the family.

The following year the firm moved around the corner to new premises in Old Burlington Street, but its gentlemen's club ambiance (wood panelling, buttoned leather sofa, shelves and cabinets stocked with bolts of cloth, ties, silks, braces and buttons) - the default Savile Row mode - is timeless.

The average price for a Savile Row suit is £5,000. For this, you are not just buying a suit but a heritage - "the epitome of British tailoring", as William Skinner puts it. He is the managing director of Dege & Skinner, renowned for its ceremonial and military tailoring and hunting uniforms, which account for between 15 and 20 per cent of the firm's business.

It made the frock coat of the Blues and Royals worn by Prince Harry when he married Meghan Markle. A full-dress ceremonial uniform of the Household Division costs £5,000; a frock coat for a Master of the hunt, £3,850. These specialities are impervious to changing fashions. Young officers will always need regimental dress. Masters of hunts will always wear pink (so-called - it's actually red).

But what is the future of the suit post-Covid? Has anyone, other than politicians and BBC newsreaders and weathermen, worn one in the past six months? And working from home, as many will continue to do, will anyone want to?

The current crisis has merely accelerated what was already a long-term trend, and one the denizens of Savile Row were already adapting to. "Over the last 20 to 25 years the wearing of the suit has gradually declined," William Skinner says. "Life has become less formal."

Like every tailor I spoke with, Dege & Skinner makes many more sports coats, blazers and casual jackets than it once did. "But there will always be a requirement for suits in certain parts of society; there are people who want to follow tradition, and want to do it properly."

Simon Cundey, the managing director of Henry Poole, agrees. Typically, he says, an 'everyday' customer at Poole will order two suits a year - one for the spring, one for the autumn, "and then come back next year and have the same thing again. That's a lovely, easy customer who we love to see all the time.

"And then we have customers who suddenly have a binge; we haven't seen them for a few years and they'll order six or seven suits and perhaps some sports jackets and a dinner suit."

(Good business, then, though a little less extravagant than the princes, emperors and shahs who patronised Henry Poole in the late 19th and early 20th century: Naser al-Din, the Shah of Persia from 1848 until his assassination in 1896, managed to rack up a bill of £884,910 - a mere bagatelle compared to the £1.8 million spent by His Highness the Khedive of Egypt.)

These people, Cundey believes, will not go away. Anda Rowland thinks that harder times may even provide a silver lining. "We saw this in 2008. People say, I'm going to buy less, but buy better, and I'll buy something from people I know, that I can have repaired, that's made ethically; we appeal to a modern audience."

In his role as chairman of the Savile Row Bespoke Association, William Skinner estimates that the Row contributes about £30 million of direct turnover to the British economy, with an unquantifiable amount from all the supply industries associated with it - the button and trim-makers, the Yorkshire wool mills whose overseas sales are considerably boosted by the selling point that their wares are recognised as the very best by the tailors of Savile Row.

The Row is an integral part of what might be called the London luxury experience: the overseas customers who come to order a suit also frequent the best hotels, eat at the smartest restaurants, buy theatre tickets; it is one part of a fragile ecosystem, all of which is now under threat.

But central to the crisis threatening Savile Row is a question that has preoccupied the bespoke trade since long before the coronavirus: rents. The narrow margins on which most firms operate, and the rent reviews that go only one way - upwards - lead one tailor to describe his business as 'basically, working for the landlord'.

And it is a situation, one hears it said, that must change if Savile Row is to survive.

"When we stop with furlough support and rate relief, and when the reality of cash flow from not being able to travel hits us at the end of the year, I think there's going to have to be a completely different arrangement with the landlord," says Rowland.

The majority of properties on the Row are owned by the Pollen Estate, which is itself owned by a combination of private family trusts and Norway's sovereign wealth fund (the latter acquired a 64.2 per cent stake in 2014), and which, since the 18th century, has owned a large tranche of east Mayfair, including much of the property on neighbouring Cork Street, long the preserve of upmarket art galleries.

The day-to-day affairs of the Estate are managed by Julian Stocks at Knight Frank. He says that the Estate has made efforts to help alleviate the immediate crisis for its Savile Row tenants, working on 'a case-by-case basis', and offering a mixture of rent-free periods, rent deferments into next year and beyond, and the option of monthly rather than quarterly rents.

"My objective as the property director is to make sure that all our stakeholders, including the tailors, the galleries in Cork Street, the restaurants and cafés, can make it through this crisis and beyond. We want to do everything we can to protect the brand that is Savile Row."

But here's the question: how to reconcile preserving the unique character of Savile Row - 'the brand' in Stocks' words - with the Estate's requirement to make a profit by charging rents that are not necessarily what the businesses that give the street its unique character can afford to pay?

Stocks acknowledges there is "a contradiction" between tenant and landlord in that respect. "But our approach is to make sure that what we charge is sustainable so that businesses can afford the rents. The more profitable I can make the tailors by helping them, then we can grow the rents sustainably over time. That's the balance to strike."

Savile Row is not a long street, but there are presently 10 empty units - all predating the pandemic. This is more, Simon Cundey told me, than he could remember in the 30 years he has been at Henry Poole.

For all the tailors I spoke to, an essential part of that balance is ensuring that Savile Row retains its character as the Mecca of bespoke tailoring, and that only a certain kind of shop should be welcomed.

The Row is one of five historic London addresses designated as 'special policy areas' by Westminster City Council (the others are Harley Street, Mayfair, St James's and Portland Place), which theoretically makes it harder for landlords to dilute each area's distinctive character by changes of use and allowing chain stores to force out smaller independent businesses.

The arrival in 2014 of an Abercrombie & Fitch childrenswear shop at number 3 Savile Row - in another age, the home of Apple Records, where the Beatles gave their last ever performance together on the roof - caused collective apoplexy, and sighs of relief when it recently closed down.

Stocks agrees Abercrombie was hardly appropriate (number 3 is not one of the buildings owned by the Pollen Estate), but says the figure of 10 empty units is misleading. Four of those units, which do not belong to Pollen, have only recently been emptied for refurbishment. Of the three owned by the Estate, Stocks says, one is under offer to a new tailoring operation.

For the second, the Estate is in discussions with two Savile Row-trained cutters to rent the unit on a "preferential basis to get them going." And the third has been offered to an accessories brand that is, he says, "symbiotic with the street.

"We need to think about fresh entrants that are accreted to Savile Row in the shop units that tailors don't like operating out of - a really great watch brand, shoe brand or hat brand that works on Savile Row. There is no point as the building owner having a series of empty shops."

Certainly, there are a number of young tailors wanting to continue the Savile Row tradition. Kathryn Sargent, who trained at Gieves & Hawkes, and for the past eight years has had her own atelier on nearby Brook Street, says she would love to be the first business with a woman's name above the door on Savile Row.

"But the current rent situation makes that prohibitive. That said, I am part of the Savile Row community, which is more than just a location; it is a network of like-minded passionate tailors who are determined to see our trade survive, evolve and adapt."

Savile Row has survived world wars, recessions and changing fashions, but Cundey believes there has never been a more critical moment in the street's history than now. The threat, he says, is existential.

Henry Poole employs 35 full-time and 15 self-employed staff - the largest number on the Row. "We are already way off revenues this year to last, and it's very worrying. The first thing we really need to do is get back to some normality where people can travel."

Seventy per cent of Poole's custom is from overseas, and the firm has trunk shows scheduled for the USA and the Far East in September and October. "Without this business," Cundey warns, "we will have to downsize drastically.

"Customers," he continues, "are eager to return. We've had calls from America, Japan, Switzerland, saying how upsetting it's been for them to lose coming for Wimbledon, Ascot, the shooting parties in the shires. The question we always ask is, when are you coming back to see us?"

[davidhuh]

Gentlemen,

it may be a good moment to call up your tailor and send some cloth...

Cheers, David

[Concordia]

True enough. The problem for me (and perhaps for others) is that I am 3,500 miles away. I could probably have trousers made and sent here safely enough, but getting a fitting on a jacket will require someone to hop on a jet and be quarantined for 2 weeks.

Not to mention the fact that I have spent the last 6 months dressing as if I were on summer vacation. My most recent bespoke order was some long-sleeved polo shirts from Ascot Chang, which have the prospect of being washable without sending them out for a proper pressing. Apart from clothing, I can count on my fingers the number of times I have worn welted shoes with laces in the last six months. Things will get back to semi-normal soon, but a lot of people may leaving the business (or expiring) before then.

At some point, I might check into the UK to see what has happened with my university, but right now that is not an attractive bet. We are back to the 19th century when it comes to cost and inconvenience of travel.

[andy57]

Gentlemen,

it may be a good moment to call up your tailor and send some cloth...

Cheers, David

I've commissioned a coat from one Savile Row tailor, a suit from another, both from London Lounge cloth, and a dinner jacket from a third who is just around the corner in St George Street. I've commissioned a jacket and a suit from my tailor here in California. Some shirts from Budd. I've bought ties from Harry White, pocket squares from Millie Bridget Henry and Sera Fine Silks, and more. I have endeavored not to hunker down and withhold my dollars from businesses that I hope will survive this crisis. I'm just one person, going a little bit crazy. But I agree with David. If you were ever thinking of commissioning something soon, and you have the means to do so, why not do it now?

[belimad]

Agree with Andy - I'm trying to do my bit, as small as it might be, to keep these amazing artisans afloat, by commissioning work to tailors both here in London as well as in Naples. It's fun, and they surely appreciate it.

That being said, with Boris sending us home one more time, the opportunity to wear bespoke is getting thinner. What I think we are lacking is a push to revive some of the ideas and concepts from an era long gone, on a smart wardrobe for when we are at home. I've talked about it with a few tailors, and other than a "more comfortable jacket", a Teba or a smoking gown, I haven't seen concepts that would truly make me feel "comfortable and smart" while sitting in endless zoom meetings. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

[davidhuh]

That being said, with Boris sending us home one more time, the opportunity to wear bespoke is getting thinner. What I think we are lacking is a push to revive some of the ideas and concepts from an era long gone, on a smart wardrobe for when we are at home. I've talked about it with a few tailors, and other than a "more comfortable jacket", a Teba or a smoking gown, I haven't seen concepts that would truly make me feel "comfortable and smart" while sitting in endless zoom meetings. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Dear Mariano,

for the "smart comfortable department", the Teba is always a good start - having several of them, for mid-season and winter, doesn't hurt. I love dressing gowns, less so for Zoom meetings, but rather for reading in the evening.
Apart from not wearing "business suits" that often this year, my daily dressing has not changed a lot. All my trousers, all my shirts are bespoke. The only item I have not purchased this year are ties. At home, I prefer wearing an ascot. My suit commissions have suffered a bit, as the only tailor I can see at the moment is the one in Milan.

Cheers, David

[Frans]

I've talked about it with a few tailors, and other than a "more comfortable jacket", a Teba or a smoking gown, I haven't seen concepts that would truly make me feel "comfortable and smart" while sitting in endless zoom meetings. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Actually that's what the waistcoat was meant for, wasn't it? It's stylish and it's comfortable. But one has to take it off when one goes to the loo, Perhaps that has contributed to its disappearance?

[andreyb]

An interesting article! -- thank you, David, for posting.

Richard Anderson just sent an e-mail announcing 20% discount for bespoke orders. It seems they dearly need new orders, indeed.

Andrey

[andy57]

I just received a jacket from Steed, made up from the Ultimate Sage Green Tweed, that is essentially in a forward fitting state. I agreed to try a fitting via Zoom. We haven't done this yet, but it's an interesting experiment for me. I'll also shoot some photos of the jacket and post them in the Cloth Club forum. I wouldn't try this with any tailor. Steed has made a number of things for me, and while we've had problems with lighter weight cloths, the job they've done with tweeds gives me sufficient confidence to try this Covid-19-confounding approach.

Os a corollary note, this is the first time I've seen the Ultimate Sage Green tweed except for a small swatch that Lovat sent me a few years ago. When we made it, I had my length sent directly to Steed, where it has remained. What a lovely cloth! Much softer than most tweeds (which was not obvious from the swatch), and a beautiful lovat/sage green. Another winner!

[alden]

Os a corollary note, this is the first time I've seen the Ultimate Sage Green tweed except for a small swatch that Lovat sent me a few years ago. When we made it, I had my length sent directly to Steed, where it has remained. What a lovely cloth! Much softer than most tweeds (which was not obvious from the swatch), and a beautiful lovat/sage green. Another winner!

Andy. Thank you. The softness of the Sage Green Tweed comes from the Angora in this particularly wonderful recipe. (The PSJ2 delivering now has the same Angora hand.)

I have had a few requests to remake the Ultimate Sage Green Tweed. If any of you are interested let me know and I will start a subscription in another thread.

As regards the challenges on the Row and among our great English tailors, I would encourage all LL members to make a special effort: place an order or two today. And to help all our British mills, buy an extra length of cloth or two or more!

Thanks David for the SR post!

Cheers

[davidhuh]

Gentlemen,

another piece one could add to the wardrobe these days is the Solaro suit. This is the perfect cloth for a relaxed outfit in spring and autumn... Just make sure to use the traditional English quality, and avoid the Italian light weights.

Cheers, David

[Jimmy9lives]

London decided it would become the premier usury/rentier city in the world where skyhigh rents and interest payments fill the coffers of the elite. They completely did not care that this model destroys actual industry and is overly reliant on foreigners especially criminals who loot countries for the benefit of Anglo-American interests.

Suddenly this model came to a sudden stop and we see the effects of being completely reliant on foreign money while building your own faux economy on doing nothing but collecting rents and fees and importing hundreds of thousands of serfs from poorer regions to service the rentier elite.

Whoever was left actually producing things in London finds himself completely broke from a few months of lost sales, why? Because all the previous years profits are spent paying rents to greedy landlords who expect payment while taking zero risk.

[Noble Savage]

The tailors of Savile Row do not depend on walk-in business. Few people strolling down the street feel seized with the compulsion suddenly to order a bespoke suit; but any street needs people, a sense of busy-ness, to come alive.

Well, then.

[couch]

I just received a jacket from Steed, made up from the Ultimate Sage Green Tweed, that is essentially in a forward fitting state. I agreed to try a fitting via Zoom. We haven't done this yet, but it's an interesting experiment for me. I'll also shoot some photos of the jacket and post them in the Cloth Club forum. I wouldn't try this with any tailor. Steed has made a number of things for me, and while we've had problems with lighter weight cloths, the job they've done with tweeds gives me sufficient confidence to try this Covid-19-confounding approach.

Andy, I've just received my completed jacket of the Brown shetland herringbone from Steed, after a Zoom fitting somewhere between a forward and a fin-bar-fin. Adjustments of the sleeve lengths were the only real changes needed, along with reminders of some details I like (lining pleat at the bottom of the back flap, under-lapel button for blustery days, etc.). Steed has made several things for me, as for you, and the final result of this one is splendid. I've been wearing it on brisk walks these first crisp October days to help this fairly springy cloth settle to my form. So to others who have a pretty well dialed-in pattern, I'd say the Zoom fittings work fine, at least for the later ones, and are worth a try to keep the pipeline moving. They have the advantage over fittings at the Kimberly that at home I have mirrors that allow me to see the back. ¡Salud!

[andreyb]

Now Fosters seem to be in trouble as well...

https://shoegazing.com/2020/10/12/news- ... oster-son/

Andrey