The Coat Route (26 page)

“Beautiful,” I say again. I can’t believe I have it on.

“The coat!” I say, wrapping my arms around myself, with the long sleeves flapping.

John and Keith beam.

B
efore Keith can back his Porsche Cayenne out of his parking space in the underground garage below his building, he has to first spread a small white towel across his lap. Rosie sits here while her owner drives. The towel helps protect Keith’s trousers, which are bespoke and made by John Cutler, who is now in the backseat.

We are going to do some shopping before lunch. Keith drives a few blocks to Holt Renfrew, an upscale department store in the heart of the city. We use the valet parking in the basement and take the elevator up to the menswear floor. An obsequious salesman, who seems to recognize Keith, escorts us through the Tom Ford, Zegna, Canali, Armani, Gucci, Loro Piana, and Balmain departments, stopping to discuss fabrics and stitching and silhouettes. Keith looks at a suit or two, and peruses some ties. I trail
along, fighting the urge to check price tags. In a while, Keith has had enough and, he says, he wants to get back to the car to make sure Rosie is all right.

“I didn’t see anything that interested me,” he says, explaining why he’s leaving empty-handed.

Over lunch, I ask Keith if he gets compliments when he wears the coat or other Cutler-made clothing.

“No, not really,” he says. “I’m not sure any of my friends really get bespoke.”

“Do you worry about the coat when you wear it out?” I ask.

“If I can secure it, get a ticket at a coat check, I’ll hand it over. If I can’t, I’ll roll it up on my seat.”

The salads are cleared. We drink some wine.

“Tell Meg about the next one,” John says to Keith.

“Well, I have a birthday coming up,” he says. “And I have always had my eye on a second coat—especially now that I’ve relocated to Canada. I thought, Why not? I could buy a car, but I would only have the car for a few years.”

“Keith has asked me to make him another vicuña overcoat,” John says. “In the tan.”

K
eith Lambert did get the tan vicuña coat made, in a style almost identical to the navy. John lined this one with Hermès silk scarves in a bright red, blue, and orange polo-pony print. Among Keith’s other notable recent J. H. Cutler commissions are a formal Scottish kilt ensemble finished with solid silver buttons and a dinner jacket in lightweight cream-colored wool. For an upcoming cruise vacation, John had suggested that Keith pair the jacket with matching cream trousers, and accessorize with a handmade Borsalino straw hat and Edward Green mink-suede shoes.

“For a more informal look, it works very well indeed,” John said of the outfit.

In mid-2012, the tailor got another call from his loyal client. Keith wanted to make sure John still had that length of black vicuña in the back room—the third and final piece of the vintage Dormeuil cloth. He said that he had been thinking he would like a full-length cape to wear over the kilt or a dinner suit.

For inspiration and guidance, John turned to his grandfather’s collection of tailoring books, and there, in one from 1870,
he found instructions for the cutting and sewing of a gentleman’s cape.

“The author of the book suggested that an ideal fabric for the cape would be vicuña. So I knew it was perfect,” John told me on the phone.

Though he had yet to settle on a final design, he thought he would suggest to Keith that it be a reversible garment, one side the black vicuña and the other a vivid cashmere—perhaps red, yellow, or blue.

Meanwhile, in Florence things have been going very well for Stefano Ricci. On a hot June night in 2012, the designer celebrated his company’s fortieth anniversary by presenting his 2013 spring and summer collection in the West Hallway of the Uffizi—a first for the museum. Men in handmade slim white suits, black crocodile jackets, and safari-style khakis had stridden past Baccio Bandinelli’s muscular
Laocoön
and down the sculpture-lined makeshift runway while guests fanned themselves with programs. The climax of the show was the appearance of eight Masai warriors, draped in red cloth and wielding spears, who did a traditional jumping dance as Stefano and Filippo took their bows. Stefano, who had been made an honorary tribal chief in acknowledgment of his generosity to Masai villages, had flown them in for the show. Later, two hundred invited guests had dined under a new moon on the Uffizi’s terrace. Just before midnight, the group walked out to the Loggia dei Lanzi to see the dramatic debut of a computerized lighting system, donated to the city of Florence by Stefano.

The new Stefano Ricci Beverly Hills store opened in 2011, followed by boutiques in Zurich, Vienna, Abu Dhabi, Paris, Ankara, and Doha, among others, bringing the total to twenty-five—with more shops planned. Stefano has also started a new division designing interiors for luxury boats. His first project, a
230-foot mega-yacht to be exhibited at the 2012 Monaco Yacht Show, featured his signature dark hardwood, travertine tile, and orange crocodile-skin upholstery. And, in the fall of 2012, he announced that he would open a new atelier in Florence, where all sewing machines were banned. His only recent disappointment was his failure, on his last African hunting trip, to bag the elusive giant croc.

In London, meanwhile, Savile Row tailors found themselves facing yet another assault from Abercrombie & Fitch. The American retail chain announced that it would be opening an Abercrombie children’s store at 3 Savile Row, right next to Gieves & Hawkes. The news spurred a group of well-groomed protesters wearing vintage bespoke suits to take to the street, chanting, “All we are saying is give three-piece a chance.”

The cheeky demonstration got wide press coverage—and helped persuade the Westminster Council to rule that the new store would not be allowed to play music that could be heard on the street and could not have customers park baby carriages on the sidewalk—but it did not stop A&F’s march on the Row. Many of the tailors were shaken.

As one said, anonymously, to a reporter, “I don’t think anyone objects to moving forward, but a chain store selling crappy clothes to ghastly people isn’t really the direction in which we should be traveling.”

Still, there was some reason for good cheer.
Downton Abbey
, the Emmy Award–winning British costume drama, took the United States by storm. By the end of its second season, in 2012, bespoke tailors and shoemakers said they were seeing a surge in orders from Americans who wanted the classic English country gentleman look.

Meanwhile, Frédéric Dormeuil took a sabbatical from the
family business to enroll in a one-year intensive MBA program to be completed in Shanghai, São Paulo, and San Francisco. Dormeuil headquarters moved to a more modern facility, also in Palaiseau, France. Machines now cut basic fabrics; high-end cloths are still being cut by hand.

In Peru, Jane Wheeler moved CONOPA’s administrative operations to a new office, away from the university. The organization is being flooded with new projects.

“There seems to be a respect for CONOPA which [wasn’t] there before,” she told me in an email.

A two-month-long official census of vicuña was to start in the fall of 2012, the first since 2000. Wheeler said she expected the numbers to be up. Prices for raw, cleaned vicuña fiber were holding steady at about $650 per kilo. (English cloth makers, meanwhile, were paying $1,850 per kilo to their vicuña-fiber suppliers.) Jane has shifted her focus, for the time being, from vicuña to the endangered guanaco, South America’s other wild camelid, on a project funded by a mining operation.

In the mills of West Yorkshire, business has slowed down.

“We have had a good run—busy for nearly three years,” Bryan Dolley told me when I checked in. “We have seen it all before—there is a natural cycle. No one is panicking just yet.” Bryan himself is not going to have to worry about it. He is about to retire.

John Thompson, the engraver, is still working late into the night, though orders have dropped off in the past year. Peter is getting better at signet rings, and the elder Thompson figures his son will be ready to take over the business in two years.

In Halesowen, the old Grove button factory was finally demolished in July 2012, after residents complained that it had become an eyesore. A three-story residential-care home was
planned for the site. Peter Grove’s button company is managing “to keep our heads above water.” Peter hired two new directors, whose expertise is in marketing, and is working to extricate himself from “the heavy responsibility of running and owning the business.”

“It is a long haul,” he told me, “but in the end it will guarantee the continuance of the business.”

As for me, I have become a scrutinizer of suits and overcoats. I exclaimed, no doubt to the annoyance of my family, “Great suit, Wills!,” when Prince William appeared on television in a bespoke beauty. I now pay almost as much attention to the cut of George Clooney’s tuxedo as I do to his face when I’m flipping through red-carpet magazine reports. In restaurants, I notice the unfortunate way some men’s jackets have ridden up behind their necks, and the way others strain at their wearer’s midsection. When I spot someone in an overcoat, I zero in on the buttons and find them, almost invariably, wanting.

I have also come to the realization that none of my own clothes really fit me properly. And I have been thinking it would be nice to order myself a bespoke garment someday, if I can ever afford it—a blazer, or maybe even a coat. I’d like to own something beautiful, made by hand, just for me—to know the bliss I heard in the voices of John Cutler’s clients when they talked about the way their clothes made them feel.

In the meantime, I am trying to be a better shopper. I haven’t sworn off fast fashion, because, let’s face it, sometimes the deals are just too amazing. Not long ago, I went to Forever 21 with my seventeen-year-old daughter. She found a truly great back-to-school dress for $12.99. But even in my glee—score!—I am trying to remember the hidden cost of these bargains. And, these days, I do more browsing and less mindless buying.

My dive into bespoke-world got me thinking that these guys, for all their fastidiousness and their foibles, are onto something. I think we could all pay more attention to the materials with which our clothes are made. We could buy fewer things but of better quality. We could search out products made with care and designed to last. We could value the herders, the shearers, the spinners, the weavers, the carvers, and the tailors. We could find beauty in a button. We could be moved, as I was, by the work of many hands to make a single perfect thing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 

T
his book would not have been possible without John Cutler, who welcomed me into his lovely world and guided me through it with patience and élan. I can’t begin to thank him. Thanks, too, to Keith Lambert, for being an extraordinarily good sport and for allowing me to peek into his closet.

I am also grateful to the following people, who generously gave me their time, expert advice, and hospitality. In England: Peter Grove, Bryan Dolley, Gary Eastwood, Paul Holt, Alan Dolley, Mark Henderson, Anda Rowland, John Hitchcock, Johnny Allen, Ray Hammett, Roger Goff, and Andrew Chan. In Peru: Jane Wheeler, Raul Rosadio, and the CONOPA crew. In Italy: Stefano Ricci, Filippo Ricci, Claudia Ricci, Niccolò Ricci, Elisa Panzeri, and Douha Ahdab. In Paris: Frédéric Dormeuil and Anne-Sophie de Boissard. In Sydney: Karl Sussmann, Leng Ngo, Genaro Scura, Rhys Twist, David Skillman, Cherelyn Suzuki, Tony Wain, Michael Egan, Tony Canvin, Davis Blumentals, Philip Knowles, Leo Schofield, Bruce Stannard, Nicholas Whitlam, John Thompson, and Peter Thompson. Special thanks to Craig Dyer for being such a gracious host.

Many people went out of their way to help me track down sources and details. Among them were Marti Devore, Leonard
Freedman, Angus Cundey, David Walters, Richard Anderson, Ben Glazier, Brian Lishak, Michael Day, Nigel Birch, Gavin Davis, Anna Lawrence Pietroni, Jenny Swindells, Jocelyn Howells, Robin Larner, Jerry DeHay, Phyllis Culp, Susan Calkins, Mia Hutchinson, Jenny Houldsworth, Annika Trimble, Sharon Katz, Carol Kerven, Sue Wittcutt, Jim Austin, Lulu Skidmore, Gabriela Lichtenstein, Letizia Caimi, Dario Donnini, and Richard D’Aveni. Thank you, all.