The Coat Route (3 page)

“You fit a man’s mind as well as his body,” Cutler liked to say. “If you give the wrong suit to the wrong man, you fail as a tailor.”

The same, of course, could be said of overcoats. There were so many possibilities—and each one made a different statement. Lambert could go, for instance, with a full-length chesterfield, with its smart velvet collar, but Cutler, knowing Keith as he did, thought that overly formal. The tailor could make him a polo wrap coat, like the kind first worn by British cavalry officers in India to keep warm between polo-match chukkers, but that could come off as a bit rakish—not Lambert’s style at all. A duffle, named for the Belgian town that made the heavy wool twill traditionally used for the toggle-closure coat, would be far too sporty; a Raglan, with its diagonal shoulder seams, too slouchy; a British Warm, too military; a car coat, too casual
.

Lambert told Cutler that he wanted the fit to be relaxed, but not overly so. He needed something that would travel well. He wanted it to be elegant, unfussy, classic, and with simple lines. Cutler drew some sketches. Lambert made some suggestions. Cutler offered his opinion, and Lambert concurred. After a bit more discussion, it was settled. The coat would be single-breasted, with welted side pockets—and a neck that could be buttoned right to the top to keep out the cold
.

Cutler wasn’t called on to make many overcoats in Sydney; the climate was too mild. But he was indeed up to the task. He had forty years of experience and a degree from the world’s best tailoring academy
. Forbes
magazine, in fact, had called him one of the best tailors in the world—right up there with the elite of London’s famed Savile Row
.

O
n a rare cloudless October morning in London’s West End, I am in a cab, stuck in traffic. The problem is not the standard transit strike or a procession of minor royals or a road race for charity. The holdup today is due to sheep. By decree of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, this is British Wool Week, and, to celebrate, Savile Row is hosting a Field Day. The block has been closed to vehicles and turned into a barnyard, complete with a thousand meters of clipped sod, a rough-hewn barn, and two flocks of no doubt puzzled sheep.

When I finally rush into the press reception at Sartoria, the restaurant that is serving as Field Day Central, the welcoming speeches are already under way. I find a spot to stand in the back of the room, elbow to elbow with a sea of men in good wool suits. Most are in dark solids or subtle chalk stripes, but a few have broken out mossy plaids with matching flat caps—the kind of foggy-heath apparel that cries out to be accessorized with hounds. One after another, the speakers sing the praises of wool, farmers, and Prince Charles, who is himself an enthusiastic keeper of sheep.

Ten months had passed since textile executives, designers, carpet makers, and retailers sat on folding chairs in a frigid two-hundred-year-old beamed barn in Cambridgeshire to hear the prince outline his five-year Campaign for Wool, aimed at reviving the Commonwealth’s moribund wool business. Charles had kept his double-breasted camel overcoat on as he stood in front of a small podium, backed by bales of hay and a red wagon full of raw wool, and bemoaned the state of the fiber that for centuries had been the glorious engine of England’s economy. The cost of shearing sheep, he said, was higher than the price being paid for wool. Demand had fallen, and farmers were reducing or eliminating their flocks.

“The future for this most wonderful fiber is looking very bleak indeed,” said the prince, who, following his comments, mingled for a time with attendees but left before the Mutton Renaissance Club served its signature mutton stew.

Committee members, many of whom are in Sartoria this morning, had worked hard since then to coordinate a week’s worth of wool promotions and photo ops all over England, designed to remind people that wool was warm, natural, comfortable, and sustainable. Field Day was their marquee event and, it must be said, the one that seemed most likely to have taken shape over a second pour of Laphroaig. (“What’s that? Sheep? On Savile Row? Smashing idea, old cod!”)

Before dawn this morning, trailers arriving from Devon, in southwest England’s moor country, had deposited sixty bathed and fluffed sheep in their temporary pasture. These weren’t just any sheep: one group was the U.K.’s last remaining flock of Bowmont sheep, developed by genetics researchers in Scotland in the 1980s by crossing Saxon Merinos with white Shetlands, with the object of producing a hardy, fine-fibered animal; the other was
Exmoor Horn, a stocky, ancient black-nosed breed with elegant backswept horns and a long, dense white fleece. The farmers, too, had been groomed for the occasion. Two historic tailoring houses, Huntsman and Anderson & Sheppard, had outfitted them—and their dogs—in bespoke attire using English wool woven on English looms.

“This is proper cloth,” a mill executive is saying to the audience in Sartoria. “It’s the cloth that, before Gore-Tex and Polarfleece, a gentleman would put on a tweed jacket with a stout pair of shoes and walk up Everest.”

The line gets a laugh, but nostalgia mists across the room as if it had been sprayed from a fine-nozzled hose.

I head outside to see the flocks and to get a feel for Savile Row, the quarter-mile side street that is as meaningful to men who are reverent about handmade clothing as Cooperstown is to baseball fans and St. Andrews is to golfers. A dozen or so of the block’s tailors are hosting open houses, and several have scheduled short presentations about some aspect of their business. This is, from what I have read, an extremely rare show of hospitality by a group that, for most of its history, has preferred to keep its activities behind drawn curtains and unmarked closed doors. Open-to-the-street windows, in fact, were unheard of until 1969, when maverick designer Tommy Nutter set up shop with master cutter Edward Sexton at 35a Savile Row, with the partial backing of Peter Brown, the managing director of the Beatles’ Apple Corps, whose headquarters were across the street.

Nutter was the darling of mod London.
Mick and Bianca Jagger, Twiggy, Elton John, and John Lennon (who, according to the author and historian James Sherwood, was known in the Nutter workrooms by the code name Susan) all sported his signature three-piece suits, with their giant skate-wing lapels, nipped-in
waists, and roomy trousers. Every Beatle except George Harrison wore his designs for the
Abbey Road
album cover. As if his designs alone weren’t enough to shake up Savile Row’s Old Guard, Nutter also dared to show off his wares in provocative window displays—one featured giant purple phallus-shaped candles and another taxidermied rats—created by a young Simon Doonan, who would go on to become the creative director of Barneys. Nutter not only allowed passers-by to see into his mirrored-wall showroom; he also had the audacity to encourage them to come in and browse.

Nutter died in 1992, of complications from AIDS, but if he had lived he probably would have loved the spectacle that is Savile Row today. There are banker types teetering between vexed and amused as they make their way through the crowd; tourists in jeans and windbreakers posing in front of the
CAUTION: SHEEP AHEAD
sign; buttonhole makers and pressers, up from their basement workrooms, taking extended cigarette breaks; and film crews who can’t seem to get enough of Harry Parker, the tweed-clad, apple-cheeked, staff-wielding farmer who appears to be having the time of his life herding his Exmoor Horns from one end of the narrow corral to the other as the cameras roll. And at the top of the street, on a roped-off square of sod, there are several people drinking champagne inside what is apparently an invitation-only sheep trailer, painted a splendid Prussian blue.

Savile Row was developed in the 1730s, on what had been part of the third Earl of Burlington’s estate, a large manicured spread on Piccadilly Street in London’s then mostly rural West End. As Richard Walker explains in
The Savile Row Story: An Illustrated History
, Lord Burlington was a well-traveled sophisticate and a talented amateur architect who poured an obsession
with ancient Rome into the construction of Burlington House, his neo-Palladian palace. Though he had wealth of his own and had married an heiress named Dorothy Savile, his extravagances left him strapped for cash. To raise money, he was forced to develop a chunk of his land. He laid out a handful of streets—Old Burlington, Cork, Clifford, Boyle, and, later, New Burlington and Savile (named for his wife in a bid, perhaps, for redemption after selling off her gardens). Lord Burlington oversaw the building of blocks of town houses, which were soon occupied by aristocrats, military men, and surgeons. Naturally, they needed proper attire, and before long tailors had opened workshops nearby to serve them.

The West End was booming at a time when ideas about how gentlemen should dress were going through a radical change. After the French Revolution, there was widespread rejection of anything that smacked of Louis XVI–style self-indulgence and excess. There was also a surge in appreciation for the classic nude male body, as depicted in ancient Greek sculpture. Meanwhile, the English gentry were discovering the great outdoors, retreating on weekends to country homes, where they spent much of their time foxhunting and dale-walking and pursuing other activities that required unfussy, comfortable attire. When some of these squires wore their country clothes into the city, they helped fuel a desire, even among urban sophisticates, for well-cut apparel made from matte-finish fabrics in subdued colors.

“
It happened quickly,” Richard Walker wrote. “One moment the average aristocrat was wrapped in velvet and lace and the next he was stepping out in rustic simplicity.”

Without the distraction of sheen and sparkle, the focus became the figure of the man himself. Skilled tailors were much in
demand. Using shaping techniques and strategically placed padding, they could give almost anyone—pigeon-breasted or potbellied—that coveted V-shaped silhouette.

“
The perfect man, as conceived by English tailors, was part English country gentleman, part innocent natural Adam, and part naked Apollo,” the art historian Anne Hollander wrote in
Sex and Suits
. “Dressed form was now an abstraction of nude form, a new ideal naked man expressed not in bronze or marble but in natural wool, linen and leather.”

The poster boy for this neoclassic austerity would soon be a young man named George “Beau” Brummell. The biographer Ian Kelly tells the story of the young man’s rise to sartorial legend in
Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style
. In 1793, the well-proportioned, Eton-educated teenager had a chance encounter with the Prince of Wales, the man who would become King George IV. The prince was so taken with the charismatic Brummell that he arranged a commission for him in his own Tenth Light Dragoons, a cushy regiment whose chief responsibilities were to wear snappy uniforms with tall tasseled boots and to tail the royal as he made his wine-soaked social rounds. Though the prince was twice Brummell’s age, he sought the younger man’s advice in matters of style and grooming, and Brummell happily dished it out—usually with his trademark shredding wit. The sensitive, chubby prince was said to have cried when Brummell told him that his pants did not fit.

Brummell was promoted to captain but resigned from the military when his regiment was assigned to the wilds of Manchester. Living on a modest inheritance, he occupied himself with maintaining and presenting his dandified self. In his Chesterfield Street home, he often had an audience of admirers—including the prince—who came to watch him go through his
daily routine. Brummell advocated cleanliness above all, which in the grime and stink of late-eighteenth-century London was a radical notion. He spent several hours shaving, brushing his teeth, plucking stray hairs, bathing in hot water or milk, and scrubbing himself pink with a stiff brush. (Biographers have suggested that the milk baths may also have soothed sores, which appeared on his skin in the early phases of syphilis.) When his daily toilet was accomplished, he dressed, always with the guiding principle that less was more.

“To be truly elegant,” he said, “one should not be noticed.”

Brummell’s everyday attire was a simple, well-tailored dark-blue wool tailcoat, worn with buff or black breeches and tall black boots (which Brummell liked to say were shined with champagne). He finished off the look with a starched linen cravat, knotted above his high-collared white shirt. Brummell was so exacting that he was known to fling dozens of wrinkled neck cloths to the floor before getting one tied to his satisfaction. When he finally stepped out the door, he was the picture of unstudied elegance and the object of awe. A chance encounter with Beau Brummell could either make your day, if he deigned to greet you, or ruin it, if he mocked your choice of overcoat—or perhaps, worse still, ignored you altogether.

Eventually, Brummell’s relentless snarkiness got him into trouble with the sensitive and increasingly pudgy prince. The last straw came in 1813, when Brummell made a crack in public about the prince’s weight. “
Who’s your fat friend?” he said to the prince’s companion, within earshot of the royal. (Brummell wasn’t the only one who harped on the prince’s girth.
The essayist Leigh Hunt was imprisoned for two years for, among other things, calling him “a corpulent man of fifty.”) Booted from the prince’s inner circle, and with gambling debts mounting, Brummell fled
England for France, where he went mad with syphilis, was institutionalized, and died alone in tattered clothes.

Brummell is considered by many to be modern history’s first celebrity, as well as the prototype for the public collapse we have come to expect from a certain kind of hot-burning fame. Despite his inelegant end, Brummell’s impact was huge.
Lord Byron observed that there were three great men of his era—himself, Napoleon, and Beau Brummell—but that, of the three, Brummell was the greatest.

Brummell fascinated Virginia Woolf as well, even if she couldn’t quite say why. In a 1925 essay about him, Woolf wrote, “Without a single noble, important or valuable action to his credit he cuts a figure; he stands for a symbol; his ghost walks among us still.”