The Coat Route (23 page)

“No one ever noticed his clothes—but that’s very often a sign of being well-dressed; people don’t actually notice what you are wearing,” Michael says.

The discussion then gets a touch heated. The conversation has turned to dry cleaning.

“It’s the immersion in fluid which bothers me,” Craig says.

“That’s why you get suits steam-cleaned,” David says.

“It’s not the cleaning, it’s the pressing afterwards that is the real problem.”

“It’s got to be blown from below and pressed from above,” says Tony. “It takes a long time.”

“Just spot-clean.”

“Air them.”

“All they need is a good brushing.…”

“We are willing to pay. We just want it done properly.”

“It’s a major, major issue,” one of the men says with exaggeration, and the others laugh, knowing how they sound.

“I just hand mine to John,” Philip says to me.

It would be pleasant, on this late-winter night with a waxing gibbous moon on the rise over Sydney Harbor, in a room full of polite, dignified men who love good suits and loathe shopping and are baffled by the appeal of status brand names—don’t get them started on Armani—to think that the dearth of skilled dry cleaners is the thorniest issue of the day. But by the time the roasted rhubarb tart and the selection of cheeses have been served, the mood has shifted.

The men are contemplating the future, a future that must look to them like some dimly lit glass-shelved hell pulsating with house music, where there are no Baccarat snifters of digestifs proffered while one peruses swatches of English wool; no third fittings for cashmere dinner jackets to be worn at the embassy affair; no collegial gatherings, like this one, of like-minded men who understand the ineffable pleasure and the incontestable sagacity of spending $7,000 or more on a well-fitting perfectly executed bespoke suit that will carry them, with perhaps an alteration or two, through the next ten, twenty, even thirty years. They are contemplating a future without J. H. Cutler.

John Cutler’s 128-year-old business is struggling. He has been battered by the recession and by made-to-measure start-ups and cheap imports, and certainly by the discouraging lack of good taste and respect for quality that has swept most of society—even among people with plenty of cash. Add to all that the natural attrition of his workforce—in the past four years, he has lost three of his jacket makers, two to cancer and one to retirement—and the resulting drop in production capability, and, well, the
picture is not good. He had to completely reorganize his operation in order to make it more economically viable.

On the advice of friends with more business acumen than he, some of whom are in the dining room tonight, he cut overhead and stopped taking a salary. Several of his longtime clients offered to order garments they didn’t really need, just to ensure his well-being in the short term. But that doesn’t make it any easier to think about what will happen in the next few years. John’s two sons, both in their thirties, have zero interest in making clothes. John Handel Lawson Cutler, it is quite clear now, will be the last to pick up the family shears. And it is only a matter of time before he drafts the pattern for his last suit and cuts his final overcoat.

“It’s not just John,” says Tony, the fabric dealer. “When I started supplying tailors in Victoria, in 1979, I had seventy-three clients. Now I’ve got five.”

“It’s a dying art,” David says.

“There just aren’t any more artisans.…”

“But the client base is out there,” says one of the men. “It’s about marketing … tapping into the desire.”

“Marketing isn’t the issue.”

“You have to tap into the psyches of people like us, who appreciate value. John has to get his name out there.”

“He’s done that.”

“It’s not marketing.”

“There aren’t any young people coming into the trade. That’s the problem.”

“Where would a young person find an apprenticeship today?”

“They can’t,” Tony says. “They might take a fashion course or a design course. Those are the options. But then they come out
and think they are designers—and they’re not. They haven’t even started. Tailoring starts at age fourteen or fifteen and then, ten years or fifteen years down the track, you may be able to make something. Today, people don’t want to work for fifteen years before they make money.”

“I don’t know what happened to the old European trade idea, but it’s gone,” David says. “And if we don’t get it back we, as a culture, will be the poorer for it.”

“People still desire quality, but they have forgotten what it is. They buy things that are expensive and they think they are getting something good, but they’re not.”

“It’s rubbish.…”

“Or they spend a lot on a lot of items of clothing and it is all absolute crap.”

“It’s disposable,” says John. “All disposable now.”

“That trend is totally contrary to John’s having a sustainable business into the future.”

“Realistically,” Tony says, speaking slowly now, “there is no hope in ten years’ time that there will be any tailors left in Australia.”

The room falls quiet for a moment.

“What do you do if you want a nice suit?” someone asks.

“You’re in trouble.”

T
he Cutler tailoring legacy can be traced back to Australia’s mid-nineteenth-century gold-rush days. Huge strikes brought throngs of fortune seekers from Europe, Asia, and America. Among them was John Cutler’s great-great-grandfather Joseph Handel Cutler, who traveled by clipper ship in December 1861
from the English Midlands to Melbourne with his wife, a talented dressmaker, and his two young sons. An engineer by trade, he quickly found work in the boomtown of Ballarat.

When Joseph Cutler’s oldest son, also named Joseph Handel Cutler, reached his teens, he decided that he wanted to be a tailor, inspired, perhaps, by his mother’s sewing skills. He climbed into a red Cobb & Company stagecoach for the long, rattling ride across the bush roads to Sydney, where he found a position as a tailor’s apprentice.

Sydney, by then, was thriving. Gas lamps lit the city streets; trams, trains, and ferries had made the growing suburbs accessible. Telephones had been installed. The Bligh Street Turkish Baths had opened, as had the Sydney Lawn Tennis Club, the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, the North Sydney Cricket Club, and several men-only social houses, including the Australian Club, patterned after upper-crust London institutions like Boodle’s and White’s. Bushland ranchers had built elegant homes to be used when they came to town. In the harbor, ships waited to be loaded with wool, tallow, and gold dust. The city was full of people—many of whom had arrived in chains or had parents or grandparents who had arrived in chains—who were suddenly, and against all odds, very rich.

And though this was egalitarian Australia—the land of the “mate”—the haves were not immune to the urge to distinguish themselves from the have-nots. At first, that meant adopting the classic Englishman-in-the-tropics style: white suits, silk shirts, and straw boater hats, according to Margaret Maynard, the author of
Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia
.

“
Eventually, though, the pressure for conformity to the norms of Europe and the need to demonstrate the maturity and the respectability
of colonial society, drove the male bourgeoisie of Melbourne and Sydney into top hats and frock coats,” wrote Robert Ross in
Clothing: A Global History
. The fact that the attire was completely wrong for the climate didn’t seem to bother them.

“
They wear shiny frock-coats and the worst brushed and most odd-shaped of top-hats, and imagine they are well-dressed,” sniffed Richard Ernest Nowell Twopenny, an ex-pat English journalist, in his book
Town Life in Australia
. “Can you imagine yourself wearing a black coat and high hat with the thermometer jogging about from 70° to 110° in the shade? If the coat were decently cut, and of good cloth and well-brushed … I might put you down a fool, but would admit your claims to be a dandy. But as it is, most of our city men are both uncomfortable and untidy. Their clothes look as if they had been bought ready-made at a slop-shop.”

Clearly, there was a need for skilled tailors. In 1884, at the age of twenty-seven, Joseph Cutler opened his own shop, J. H. Cutler, on King Street. By the early 1900s, the firm’s customer list was a who’s who of Australia’s élite. Joseph’s son Leslie took over in 1932, and moved the business to larger quarters, occupying four floors in a grand red-brick terraced house at 7 Bligh Street. They would be there for the next fifty years, eventually employing nearly two dozen tailors on two floors of workrooms.

Leslie Cutler was a stickler. One morning, looking out the window of the shop, he saw a man wearing a suit he had delivered just the day before walking into the Union Club across the street. The man, he noticed with alarm, was wearing the wrong shoes for the suit. He called the club and had the customer summoned to the telephone.

“Sir,” he said, “I made that suit to be worn with black shoes, not brown.”

Cutler suits did not come cheap. “
I was always given a chair while [Cutler] made out a receipt,” recalled the 1930s memoirist Lydia Gill, who was sometimes sent to pick up garments for her boss. “The suits being paid for were usually about 25 pounds each—a house could be furnished for about 50 pounds. I was staggered, and really needed that chair so graciously produced.”

In 1939, Leslie’s son Bruce returned from London, where he had spent a few years studying the trade, to manage the family business. Thirty years later, Bruce’s son, John Handel Lawson Cutler—with whom I am now riding in a silver Jaguar borrowed from his client Craig Dyer, through the streets of Sydney’s leafy northern suburbs—would follow the same path to the by then legendary shop on Bligh Street.

“I never wanted to do anything else,” John says. We are driving into Wahroonga, down streets shaded by broad fig trees and past grandly restored Arts and Crafts–style houses set behind trimmed Viburnum hedges. John is wearing what for him must be the obvious choice for a morning drive: a lightweight suede bomber jacket, pleated navy cotton-and-cashmere corduroy trousers, a checked shirt, and a sky-blue silk knit necktie. “Drake’s of London,” he says of the tie when I ask. His handmade Italian shoes—“Stefano Bemer”—exactly match his jacket’s caramel hue.

“I was sewing under the table at school. I made waistcoats for the teachers,” he tells me.

John grew up nearby, in the suburb of Pymble. At sixteen, the same year he saw the Beatles play in concert at Sydney Stadium, he graduated from Sydney Grammar, a well-regarded private school, and began working in the workroom in the mornings. In the evenings, he learned the basics of sewing, cutting, and making patterns. In 1966, at the age of eighteen, he sold his drum
kit and his Honda motor scooter to buy a ticket for England on board the fourteen-hundred-passenger
Castel Felice
, a gleaming white Italian liner.

“I had two brand-new suits that the firm had made for me. My other prized possession was an oversized pillar-box-red, roll-necked jumper that my sisters knit to keep me warm in the English winter. It became very much a talking point on the ship.”

There was plenty of time to admire John’s oversized sweater: the voyage lasted five and a half weeks.

“It became like our own country,” he says.

John drank Bacardi and Cokes and danced to the four-piece band, whose members, in shiny red jackets and black bow ties, played Beatles tunes again and again as the ship steamed east. There were folk-singing lessons and card games in the Verandah Lounge, pillow fights on beams above the swimming pool, and a traditional Crossing the Equator “baptism” ceremony during which plates of spaghetti were dumped on the heads of passengers who had been plucked out of the crowd.

“The first time I ever saw snow was when we arrived in Southampton on December eighth. I remember waking up and looking out at the wharves covered in white. I checked into a hotel near the Marble Arch in London. The morning after I arrived, I rushed out of the hotel and slipped on the ice on the top step and ended up on my rear end in the street.”

John went to the Tailor and Cutter Academy in London’s West End, which, from the time it was established in 1866 until it shut its door in the 1970s, was the Oxford University of tailoring.

“I used to drive around on a motorcycle—this skinny kid in a huge red sweater riding a Royal Enfield 750cc. It was the height
of swinging London—Carnaby Street, music, fashion. And then there were the bowler-hatted clients on Savile Row. I loved the contrast of it all.”

John wandered the food hall in Fortnum & Mason, drank Newcastle Brown Ale in the Glassblower pub, sipped tea at the Ritz, admired the miniskirted women coming out of Mary Quant, and got a job at Dormeuil, the Paris fabric merchant, whose London headquarters was in an imposing six-story Edwardian building in Golden Square, close to Savile Row.

“My first job there was making pattern books. I got to know all about different fabrics. Then I was moved to the Home Trade department. I remember handling vicuña back then. If you were a salesperson who needed samples, you had to get a director of the firm to come and unlock the cages where the vicuña was kept. It was in sixty-meter rolls—in navy, black, and natural. There was a lot of talk about an Arab sheikh who used it for curtains for his palace; it was all done with suitcases full of cash.”

John came back to Sydney in 1969, before his twenty-first birthday, with a diploma in “cutting gentlemen’s tailor-made garments.” He had also adopted a personal style that turned heads.

“Shortly after I returned, walking down the platform of a city train station wearing spats and a homburg hat and carrying a walking stick, I ran into one of my best friends,” John continues. “He was dumbfounded. He and his fiancée had been staring and laughing at me, before they realized it was me. And I got beaten up once by a bunch of bikies in leather jackets. I was coming home from work in a rather smart suit, cane, and hat. I was a choice target.”

John, I am learning, comes by his quirkiness honestly. His family tree is filled with exotic fruit: red-haired operetta singers
who lived in arctic log cabins; London massage-parlor owners; bareback riders who raced with Indians in the wilds of Calgary; heavy drinkers of whiskey who eschewed doctors and lived into their hundreds. His father, a champion rugby player, met his mother playing leapfrog in Kew Gardens. John himself has been married four times and has three grown children and a thirteen-year-old daughter, whose mother is a former live-in girlfriend. A few months prior to my arrival in Sydney, his wife of two years had left him while he was in London on a business trip. He came home and she was gone. No note, no nothing.