Word on the street

Simon Cundey, Managing Director of Henry Poole & Co, the longest-standing bespoke tailor on Savile Row, isn’t an easy man to pin down. When we speak, it’s via an early morning phone call to New York, where he’s in the middle of a trunk show, taking Henry Poole’s handmade tailoring stateside.

“We’re seeing a broadening of demand right across the US,” he says, citing renewed interest from overseas customers in “long-lasting and elegant clothes”. Certainly, Henry Poole & Co's clothes are both long-lasting and elegant, but the house is also working hard to ensure its tailoring is designed for modern tastes. Last summer, Cundey and his team unveiled a new, super-lightweight suit, designed with the structure and three-dimensional shape that defines a Savile Row suit, but carries a fraction of the weight. “It’s been a huge success,” he says, particularly among clients in the US and southeast Asia.

Henry Poole & Co’s new lightweight take on a classic Savile Row silhouette is just one of a number of innovations taking shape on the street. Edward Sexton’s ready-to-wear collection, for example, now offers several different silhouettes designed to make life easy for clients, from an unstructured, cardigan-like jacket adorned with trademark Sexton peak lapels to a drape jacket with a louche, roomy silhouette and extended shoulder line. Elsewhere, Gieves & Hawkes’ bespoke workshop is experimenting with unlined, informal jacket designs, and Ozwald Boateng – one of the Great Creative Britons at the Walpole British Luxury Awards 2023 – is offering slim-cut, indulgent-looking suits with vivid colours and patterns inspired by Boateng’s Ghanaian heritage.

Knatchbull (formerly known as The Deck), meanwhile, continues to blaze a trail as the first women’s only tailor with a shopfront on the street in Savile Row’s history. In October last year, the brand launched a ready-to-wear capsule to supplement its made-to-measure offering, and the collection has grown rapidly. “Ready-to-wear makes up around 30 per cent of our sales now,” says Founder & CEO Daisy Knatchbull. “Many customers were asking us ‘where do I find the perfect silk shirt?’ Or ‘where do I find a good white T-shirt?’ So, we were in a unique position to understand what our clients felt was missing from the market.”

Knatchbull has another advantage, too. “We had the measurements of 2,500 women on file with great data on size and fit,” Knatchbull continues. “We were able to develop our own fits and sizes by averaging the measurements of all the data we had available. It’s been really well received, and clients find the fit of our garments to be fantastic.”

Savile Row might be a tailoring destination, but it’s not just tailors who are using data to enhance what they do. At the other end of the street sits shoemaker Arthur Sleep, an 11-year-old footwear brand that made its home on the Row two years ago. Co-founded by Jahangir Azam and Christopher Boadle, Arthur Sleep uses 3D scanning technology to transform the traditional craft of shoemaking.

All the brand’s shoes are made in a dedicated workshop that sits beneath the ground floor showroom at No 7 Savile Row. Just about any kind of footwear you can imagine – from velvet slippers to sneakers – is made to order for clients by hand. But, when a client visits the store, their feet will be captured by a purpose-built 3D scanner, which allows the Arthur Sleep team to create shoes with unique, form-fitting features – supporting dropped arches or making allowances for high insteps, for example.

This made-to-order, customisable approach is unique, and for Azam and Boadle it solves big problems in the footwear industry. “Foot health is in major decline, and 50 per cent of all footwear ends up in landfill,” Azam says. “We need a radically different approach.” This different approach is a long-term vision for Arthur Sleep, whereby the brand plans to create “a network of micro-factories” that could make shoes locally in key markets, rather than making everything in a single factory and shipping it worldwide. “The footwear industry needs a manufacturing model that’s agile, small-scale and responsive. The sustainability benefits of localising production are huge,” Boadle explains.

Over the street from Arthur Sleep sits another relative newcomer, clothsurgeon. Founded by Rav Matharu, the company takes its name from Matharu’s preference for cutting patterns with a scalpel, rather than traditional tailor’s shears. Known for creating bespoke tailored streetwear and designing one-of-one pieces for clients, clothsurgeon is a dramatically different proposition from the likes of Henry Poole & Co or Knatchbull but shares common values with its besuited neighbours.

“It’s a privilege to tell our story through what is probably the greatest menswear street in the world,” Matharu says. “We try to bring a creative edge and contemporary flair to what ‘bespoke’ means.” He designs and drafts the patterns for all clothsurgeon garments personally, working through a process of individual sketches for clients. From cashmere MA-1 bomber jackets to three-piece suits made from up-cycled grey jersey, each piece is then tailored in a small workshop in east London, with client fittings at key stages in the process to perfect the garment.

You might expect the tailoring establishment to baulk at the arrival of brands like Arthur Sleep and clothsurgeon, but Cundey is a pragmatist. “There’s huge value in brands that bring different markets to the street,” he says. “That’s the beauty of Savile Row; different kinds of businesses arriving is nothing new. I remember the days of Tommy Nutter in the Seventies and Richard James in the Nineties. I remember Ozwald moving in. They all brought another perspective to keep the Row moving forward.”

Where Savile Row is heading next is anyone’s guess, but there’s no doubting the creativity of the street’s age-old stalwarts and newcomers alike. In 2024, London’s tailoring heartland is in rude health.

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