Savile Row Anecdotes

Savile Row has survived as the number one tailoring precinct in the world precisely because it has changed with the times. In fact, no other precinct is instantly recognisable by name anywhere else. Many styles that we take for granted today are embryonic of Savile Row.

Here are a few examples of how Savile Row has remained at the forefront of sartorial innovation and how its new generations’, one after the other have set new standards through instituting change and at times causing a little controversy along the way.

1860
Bertie, the rakish Prince of Wales, ordered a short smoking jacket to wear at informal dinner parties at Sandringham from his friend, the tailor, Henry Poole. It was the first dinner jacket on record and was cut in midnight blue cloth. In 1886, a Mr James Potter of Tuxedo Park, New York, was a houseguest at Sandringham. He consequently ordered a similar dinner jacket to Bertie's from Henry Poole & Co. It was this dinner jacket that Mr Potter wore at the Tuxedo Park Club inspiring numerous copies that fellow members wore as informal uniform for stag dinners. Thus the Tuxedo was born at Henry Poole & Co. It took only eight years for an accidental style to cross the Atlantic Ocean and soon became an American institution. Its humble, royal beginnings were soon forgotten when labelled the Tuxedo. Perhaps a more suitable name would be ‘the Bertie’, or ‘Prince of Wales’, or even ‘The Henry Poole’. not so unimaginable when you consider the ‘Harris Tweed’.

1991
Former Tommy Nutter apprentice Timothy Everest - who answered Nutter's newspaper advertisement for a 'Boy Wanted' - opened his first bespoke tailoring shop in an East End Georgian townhouse declaring 'opening a shop on Savile Row would be like moving in with my parents'. 2006 Timothy Everest eats his words as he moves in with his parents, not quite on Savile Row, but just around the corner in Burton Place, a long way from East End London. Perhaps living with the folks is not so bad after all.

1992
Richard James, the first of the 'New Generation' tailors, opened a shop on Savile Row. James introduced Saturday opening (a revolution on Savile Row) and a fashionable edge not seen since The House of Nutter's glory days. Tommy Nutter died that same year. As a fitting epitaph, one of Nutter's final commissions is the outlandish purple suit Jack Nicholson wore playing The Joker in Tim Burton's Batman. These days Richard James is more conservative in his approach, none the less he is still considered very much an innovator and part of the new bespoke movement on Savile Row.

‘Savile Row an English institution worth preserving and prolonging’