On the Savile Road

The jacket nips in at the waist, flares out slightly at the side with twin vents in the back. Padding squares off the shoulders. There are four buttons on the sleeve, and -- a vestige from days when gentlemen rolled back their cuffs to duel or simply wash their hands -- the buttons unbutton. The look of a custom-made Savile Row suit is unmistakable. So is its durability, mainly because of thousands of hand-stitched seams in the canvas foundations. For all its vaunted prestige, the suit's greatest virtue may actually be its price: even with a 21% import duty, a suit delivered in the U.S. generally costs $200 to $250 v. $250 to $300 for U.S. custom-mades.

Increasingly, Savile Row suits are being worn in cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Houston -- not because more U.S. businessmen are going to Britain, but because London tailors are finding the U.S. market increasingly lucrative. At least 15 West End firms now sedately barnstorm the major cities twice a year, fall and spring, showing swatches, taking measurements and writing orders. Last week the last of the year's traveling tailors (usually a partner or a director) had packed up their sample cases and returned to London. They were celebrating their best year ever, and cutters were already at work making a record number of suits (delivery time: eight to twelve weeks) that Americans had ordered this fall.

Spirit Levels & Polaroid. "The first thing American clients say is 'Don't give me an English suit,' " says Louis Stanbury, partner of Kilgour, French & Stanbury. "I tell them if they want a sack suit they should go to Brooks Brothers." What Stanbury and his confreres have done is to marry English and American tailoring into a "mid-Atlantic cut." This is somewhat arrogantly described as "not quite what an Englishman would wear," but with more shape than the typical U.S. suit. Nor is shape the only compromise. Lacking central heating, Englishmen prefer fabrics weighing 15 ounces to 20 ounces per running yard; San Franciscans choose almost English weights, but otherwise, says Stanbury, "we can't sell anything over twelve ounces."

English tailors have made a science of measurements. Consider Walter Norton of Norton & Sons, who tailored a shooting suit for Bing Crosby with "plus twos" and also suits for Jack Paar and ten U.S. ambassadors. First, Norton snaps Polaroid pictures of the client front and side. Then, he drapes him in a Rube Goldberg contraption made out of wire rods, cloth tapes and spirit levels (to spot a dropping shoulder); it takes eight minutes just to get the rig on, after which Norton spends up to half an hour taking 25 separate measurements. "If they were standing at attention at the beginning, they relax by the end; so the risk of missing a comfortable fit is less," explains Norton.

Fitting at 3 a.m. English tailor-made suits carry no labels, and the firms themselves seldom, if ever, advertise, prefer to prosper by word of mouth. The remark, "My London tailor's in town," quietly passed along among friends, seems to work wonders. J. C. Wells Ltd. sent its first traveling man to the U.S. in 1927 on a "prestige visit," was surprised when he came back with 100 orders; this year Wells's man, A.S. Richardson, brought back 1,000 orders, an increase of 200 over five years ago. Henry Poole & Co. has American family accounts going back to the 1880s (one of the partners survived the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania); today 40% of Poole's total orders are from the U.S.

Not only are American businessmen good credit risks ("Some even pay twice by mistake," marveled one Briton), but they are also overwhelmingly hospitable. "They kill us with kindness," protested one tailor, who finds himself invited out for dinner and away for weekends. In London, he might be invited in for a drink at most, and that only if he delivered a suit personally. In return, the Englishmen go all out to satisfy their customers. Traveling Partner Frederick Lintott of H. Huntsman & Sons, which specializes in hunting pinks and riding clothes, recalls vividly being awakened at 3 a.m. in his Biltmore suite in Manhattan by a Southern belle who wanted a hacking jacket fitted. Mr. Lintott sleepily obliged. "She was well escorted," he adds primly.

Magic Ingredient. Kilgour, French & Stanbury, whose clients include Novelist Patrick Dennis, David Merrick and CBS Chairman William Paley, thought nothing of fitting two vicuna overcoats for a 20th Century-Fox executive in the VIP lounge of the London Airport while he was between planes. Boston Symphony Orchestra Conductor Erich Leinsdorf remembers that "whenever I played at Festival Hall, Stanbury would go there and study my motions so he could improve my full-dress suit."

The only problem after an American has received his handmade Savile Row suit is how to care for it. U.S. cleaners, say the British tailors, machine-press suits on a standard form that tends to stamp out whatever shape was tailored in. But Huntsman, for one, has an answer for even that. Once a year or so, its customers send their suits back to London and Huntsman will have them wet-cleaned and pressed by hand, thus returning the suit to its original texture and shape. Huntsman's magic ingredient? Scotch river water.

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