Two Champions of British Craft on the Staying Power of Savile Row
“Good clothing only gets better with age,” says Patrick Grant. It’s a simple statement—but a rarer sentiment than one would hope. Grant is the founder of Community Clothing which makes a selection of wardrobe staples all crafted from natural fibers by British manufacturers. He’s also the author of the new book, Less, Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier.
Last month, I spent some time chatting with Grant and Douglas Cordeaux, the managing director of The Merchant Fox, which manufactures some of the finest suiting textiles on the market. What resulted was a conversation about the heart of British style — about consumption, quality, and luxury, and why Savile Row is perhaps the finest retail blueprint of them all.
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Cut from the Same Cloth
For our conversation, Cordeaux looks every bit the proper English gentleman flannel suit and tie, his neat coif of wavy silver hair a perfect complement to his classic good looks and to his two whippets, Hector and Annie, whose noble blue-gray snouts poke into frame occasionally. Grant, with his impish charm, joins us wearing a well loved rugby jersey from his Community Clothing line, his hair loosely tousled having stopped between chores (some routine fence mending and pig minding) to chat. At face value, the pair ostensibly look quite distinct, but just beneath the surface they share all the same values when it comes to dressing well.
It begins with a simple principle: buy once, wear well. It’s no coincidence that both Grant and Cordeaux fell in love with suiting not from perusing the latest and greatest at the most high-end department stores, but in suits made and worn by generations before them. For Grant, his love of suiting began at fourteen when he began being able to wear his father’s suits which had been hand made in the sixties and seventies.
“I started wearing suits in college,” Cordeaux tells me. “There was a fantastic shop in Camden called Alfred Kemp and they had huge amounts of secondhand suits, all bespoke from the forties and fifties. I tried them on, they all fit, though I had a few little adjustments made by my friends at college. And that’s where my love of suits came from: understanding longevity, finding the tailor’s details on the inside pockets, utility marks.”
Cordeaux, who’s spent most of his life working in textiles, and Grant, whose resume also boasts a litany of manufacturing-centric work, understand firsthand what makes good quality clothing. The unfortunate truth is that in a world that puts a premium on the hottest newest trends, it’s an outlook that’s often at odds with the rest of “luxury” fashion. But not, as they attest, one that’s going anywhere soon on Savile Row. “It’s important to say the community in and around Savile Row is very healthy,” says Grant.
It’s a buoying perspective, especially amid growing moves to offshore manufacturing and a generally more relaxed approach to dressing, in particular post-Covid. Grant insists too that it’s prescient to consider the ways in which society has deemed skilled manual labor, lesser. And the intrinsic link between this and the devaluation of the manufacturing work that goes into Savile Row and retail writ large, from textiles to sewing and tailoring. But simply put: there is no machine or corporate factory that can do what Savile Row does; no AI algorithm or automation or outsourcing that can subsume the craft undertaken at the ancillary shops and businesses that support the Row. These are, unequivocally and necessarily human businesses that rely on human hands creating true quality goods. “If you scratch beneath the surface of Fox Brothers, you’ll find a team of weavers,” says Cordeaux. “You’ll find Dan who’s doing the warping. You’ll find Alison who’s doing the drawing in. You’ll find a team of Menders. You have David who does the finishing, and we make everybody aware of what they’re making and it is a skill.”
Optimistically, Grant says he’s noticed a swing back towards young people wanting to work in the tailoring trade. “I think there is a really interesting shift finally happening back toward jobs where we are using our hands and our minds and skilled manual jobs are now things that people in their twenties and thirties with degrees are actively going back to learn.”
Rules of the Row
Sustainability is oft an all too nebulous term. But in this case, it’s neatly and clearly contextualized not by considerations of greenhouse gasses or climate change but in terms of what it means to wear clothes well and look good doing it. “There is probably no more sustainable clothing model anywhere in the world than the one that’s followed by the tailors on Savile Row,” says Grant.
“We will do our absolute damnedest to make that suit last as long as possible, which is antithetical to almost the entire clothing industry, but it is absolutely hardwired into the way we work. We would love you to have that suit still in use a century from now. And we’re just never encouraging you to buy something that you don’t need.” Savile Row, he points out, does not have seasonal collections the way other luxury fashion commerce industries do.
It’s a fascinating dichotomy— on one hand, the Row and what it represents is regarded as a bastion of luxury. To the average American consumer, it emits an aspirational luster: to have one’s suits made on Savile Row is the ultimate menswear experience. But what’s unique still about Savile Row is that it’s divergent from the world of commerce, fashion, and luxury retail in a myriad ways, primarily as it pertains to consumerism. A successful shopping trip on the Row is one that need not be repeated for many years to come; where a premium is put on the work of tradespeople, not the labels or the brand recognition. And while terms like old money and quiet luxury are overwrought, unavoidably these principles do illustrate a microcosm of how the old-money elite, so to speak, shop. It’s a model based on investment, quality, longevity, and function. For a world widely understood to be the top rung of a society climbing ladder, it rejects superfluity, ostentatious label bearing goods, and gauche displays of wealth.
And it’s not just the Row. Consider the Barbour coat. Cordeaux just had his rewaxed: a jacket that was first given to him as a gift for his 21st birthday. “It’s nearly forty years old and it’s been worn pretty much every weekend. There’s a lot of unintentional commitment that’s gone into that jacket.”
It’s a quintessentially British way of life and there’s a quiet irony in it. When you consider the oversaturated discourse of old and new money, of how clothing and luxury goods can and are used to telegraph our station in life, there are few annals of society more insular, more aspirational or coveted than the British “elite.” King Charles, Grant points out, wears his clothing forever. Cordeaux regails us with a story about his latest trip to the Goodwood Festival of Speed. “I’m often asked what it is to be British, and on that Saturday with the rain absolutely hammering down, everybody looking spectacular, really well-dressed, people putting their feet into really big puddles, getting their feet really wet, people racing around British classic cars, coming off £250,000 worth of damage, but that to me was quintessentially British-ship,” he says.
A “Proper” British Gentleman
There is nothing more dissonant with this lifestyle than the overt and lavish consumption that feeds the fashion industry. Neither is there anything less masculine, less gentlemanly. This unfussy attitude towards clothing can feel contradictory to the delicacy taken in creating a Savile Row suit, but to confuse the two would be to forget that these garments are made with the utmost quality, expressly so the wearer doesn’t have to be precious about them. There’s nothing more unattractive than a man who can’t run to get the car simply because it’s raining; nothing more inelegant than a man who prioritizes the primping of his appearance over the comfort of his acquaintances.
Grant says when he was filming a promo for the Great British Sewing Bee, which he co-hosts, producers wanted him to list two things he couldn’t live without. His response: a good suit and a bicycle. “So I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to ride my bike around in my suit,’ and everyone was like ‘You’re going to ride your bike in a suit?’ And it’s like, what are you talking about? Of course I can ride a bike in a suit.”
Both Grant and Cordeaux admire men for whom style is defined not by which left of center runway look their stylist pulled for a red carpet, but instead who exercise a level of restraint and class about their approach to dressing. “There’s an interesting piece in one of David Niven’s biographies,” says Grant, “where he describes moving to Hollywood and he only had one suitcase. I think he has a dinner suit, a regular suit and four shirts. And he was considered one of the best dressed men on the planet.”
Cordeaux adds that the generation of men like Cary Grant, Fred Astaire was responsible for their own dressing; likely the sort of men who had one, maybe two bespoke tuxedos they wore to each award show (and looked damn good doing it). It’s not an entirely lost art and Cordeaux and Grant name check a few celebrities who they know are regulars on the Row: Ralph Fiennes, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth. Cordeaux even shares an encounter he had when a colleague called him into their shop to show some textile samples to a client. When he arrived, he found himself chatting about blue flannel with Charlie Watts. Patrick adds, for his own part he’s worn the same suit for the same award ceremony over the last twenty years. “Nobody has ever gone, “fucking hell here’s here in that same suit again.””
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