A short street with a long reputation
Savile Row runs for a few hundred yards between Conduit Street and Vigo Street, parallel with Regent Street on the eastern edge of Mayfair, and for the better part of two centuries it has been the centre of English bespoke tailoring. The names over the doors are old ones. Henry Poole and Co, at number 15, can trace its history on the Row back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Huntsman, founded in 1849, is at number 11, and Dege and Skinner at number 10. Anderson and Sheppard, whose soft shoulder has its own following, is around the corner on Old Burlington Street.
It is also a working street rather than a museum. Behind many of the shop fronts, and in the basements below them, cutters and tailors are at work on suits that will not be finished for weeks. The street has its moments of fame as well: the Beatles gave their last public performance on the roof of number 3 in January 1969. But its real business is quieter, and it is conducted a few inches at a time.
What bespoke means, and why it takes fittings
A bespoke suit begins with a paper pattern cut for you and nobody else. The cutter takes a long list of measurements, notes how you stand, which shoulder sits lower, how you carry yourself, and drafts a pattern from all of it. You choose a cloth from the books of samples, and the suit is then made largely by hand, the coat by one craftsman and the trousers by another. This is what separates it from made to measure, where an existing pattern is adjusted to your figures rather than drawn from the beginning.
Because the pattern is new, the suit has to be tried on while it is being made. The first fitting is the baste, a loosely tacked shell that the cutter will mark, pin and often pull apart to recut. The second, the forward fitting, is much closer to a finished coat. The last is for the final adjustments. Three fittings is the usual number and some houses expect four, and from the first measurement to the finished suit the process commonly takes a couple of months or more. The first fitting alone is generally a few weeks away from the day you were measured.
Why the first appointment belongs in the opening days
This is the whole secret of commissioning a suit on a business trip: be measured at the beginning of your stay, not at the end. A guest who walks onto the Row on his last afternoon can do nothing more than choose a cloth and leave his measurements, and the suit will not move again until he returns. A guest who is measured in the first day or two of a longer visit gives the cutter time to draft the pattern while he is still in London, and on a stay of a fortnight or so some houses can manage a first fitting before he flies home. Ask when you book whether that is possible; do not assume it.
Allow an unhurried hour or more for the first appointment, and longer if the choice of cloth is going to be a pleasure rather than a formality. Wear, or bring, the kind of shirt and shoes you mean to wear with the suit, since both affect how it is cut. And tell the house plainly when you expect to be in London again, because the rest of the schedule is built around those dates.
How the Row reaches a client abroad
The houses have been dressing clients who live elsewhere for as long as they have existed, and they are very good at it. Several times a year their cutters travel to cities across Europe, the Americas and Asia and hold fittings in hotel suites, so that a client who began a suit in London can have his forward fitting at home. Others simply arrange the remaining fittings around the client's next visit to London. When the suit is finished it can be collected, or sent on.
The pattern stays with the house. That is the quiet advantage of the whole undertaking, since a second suit cut from a pattern that has already been proved needs fewer fittings than the first, and a client who returns to the same cutter over the years is dressed with less and less effort on either side. A first bespoke suit is an investment of time more than anything else, and the time is repaid on every one that follows.
An afternoon on the Row, in company
A fitting is an errand. An afternoon on the Row with somebody who knows it is something else entirely. A companion who understands cloth will tell you honestly which of the three navies you are hesitating over suits you, will notice when a jacket pulls across the back before the cutter has said so, and will make the half hour of waiting while a baste is pinned into a conversation rather than a chore. Afterwards the streets around are made for walking: through Burlington Arcade to Piccadilly, or west along Conduit Street towards Bond Street, or down to Albemarle Street for a drink at the end of the day.
For a guest in London for several days, days rather than hours is the natural arrangement: quoted as one sum once I have the dates and a frank account of how much of the day is yours, with hours of her own built in. For a single afternoon the ordinary ladder applies, from £250 for the hour to £500 for two, and every length is on the tariff. Either way the fee is handed to your companion in person when she arrives, on the first day of a longer arrangement or at the door of a shorter one. If you have not yet decided on the cloth, the letter on lounge suits has some firm views on colour.
Who knows the Row
The toned women of the circle tend to be the ones who care most about how clothes are made, perhaps because they know exactly how a garment ought to move. Tina lives within a quarter of an hour's walk of Albemarle Street, is fast, direct and genuinely funny, and likes to finish an afternoon by walking out through Bond Street. Angelika dresses almost entirely in dark tailoring and has strong opinions about shoulders, which she will share only if asked.
Sonya is the calmest company in the house and the one I would choose for a stay of several days, since she is entirely at ease with long gaps in an itinerary and never fills them with chatter. Their pages are in the Salon, along with every other woman in the circle.
One line of the presentations carries most of the names above, and that line is toned and athletic.
Alongside it
Tonight
Put it to use
What this letter describes takes one written line to set in motion, and Booking shows how little there is to it.