Is Savile Row Hanging by a Thread ?
If you had taken a walk down Savile Row last fall, you’d have found yourself on a glitzy London shopping street, super-cars lined up on either side and well-dressed city slickers strolling between stores with suit bags fit to burst. Skip forward 12 months, and all that has gone. As the UK slowly emerges from its lock-down slumber, the Row feels more like a sleepy side street than one of the world’s most famous retail destinations.
Savile Row has been the lodestar of bespoke tailoring for over two centuries; the street’s oldest firm, Henry Poole, opened its doors in 1806. Today, more than 15 world-class tailoring firms work inside whitewashed Georgian townhouses to create exceptional men’s clothing by hand. Most bespoke suits here cost between $5,000 and $6,000, require an average of three fittings and take around 80 hours of handwork over roughly three months to complete, passing through up to five different specialist craftspeople on the way. It’s a time-honored process and the definition of old school. To step inside your chosen tailor’s shop is to begin a personal relationship with people who are on hand to create one-of-a-kind clothes that will last a lifetime.
The past year and a half, though, has presented Savile Row with unique challenges. For starters, even before the smart-shirt-and-pajama-pants uniform of recent months, the suit’s place in the world was growing less and less certain, as
