Push on the heavy door at Henry Poole & Co and the first thing that hits you is a sense of continuity. The tie rack squeaks as it turns. The man behind the counter, in braces and bow-tie, quietly schemes adjustments to a suit. An old clock ticks away on the mantelpiece.
Alan Alexander is senior cutter at Henry Poole, a shop that appeared on Savile Row in central London in 1846, when the road was used for parking carriages near Regents Street.
Bearing down on the walls are 20 wax-sealed warrants from European royals, including Napoleon III, and images of other famous customers, Edward VII, JP Morgan, Jawaharlal Nehru and Winston Churchill aged 19, for whom the tailor worked hard to enlarge the shoulders and chest. Many of these men would have sat in the shop with claret and a cigar. Sit by the fireplace and you may feel the buzz of a sewing machine from the floor below.
Mr Alexander, 65, sports precise white hair and beard. His glasses are perched at the end of his nose, his tape measure draped around his neck. He will oversee the creation of a suit from scratch, taking the measurements, cutting the pattern and cloth, overseeing the tailors who work on different parts, conducting a series of fittings and amendments to get the details just right. The final meeting with the customer is known as the “blessing”. Each suit costs between £5,000 and £12,000.
For Mr Alexander, the skill lies in applying his experience to each body shape, creating a suit that should feel like a second skin. “As I take the measures — chest, waist, sleeve and sleeve to back, trouser — I automatically scan the figure, too,” he says. “Round back, down right, prominent chest. Nowadays, of course, we can take a photo and when you see the face it all comes back. ‘Ah yes, the chap with the prominent calves.’ ”
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He’s tackled a few challenges over the years: fitting an unusually tall man bent over with arthritis; incorporating a pocket for a Californian customer’s gun; creating for an old English gentleman a coat that wraps more than four inches rather than the usual one and a half. “It’s because he puts so much in his pockets, this year’s diary, last year’s diary, next year’s diary and a wad of letters. And his chequebook. Whenever he takes these things out and lays it on the shelf, you wouldn’t believe it’d all go back in.”
It takes 70 to 80 man hours to make a suit. The art is in being able to work relatively quickly yet produce something ageless. Below ground, 38 tailors work diligently in a warren of suit racks and steam irons, clothes draped over knees as they perch on worktops and stitch. Scraps of material lie all over the floor. The smell is like that of a dry cleaner.
Mr Alexander did his apprenticeship as a coat maker at 16 in an age of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, flares, kipper ties and three-piece suits. He had a strange first day. “The tailor sent me to the trimming merchants to get a thimble, a pair of shears and a ruler. He then gave me a needle, put the thimble on my thumb and gently held it back in position, saying, ‘Today I want you to just put that needle through, just keep holding it and pulling it and then do it faster.’ For a whole day.”
He was equally surprised by the travel. Cutters regularly head abroad for trunk shows, pitching up at hotels and selling their wares to chief executives and lawyers. Mr Alexander’s clients include an art dealer from New York and the owner of an American football franchise. Export represents 70 per cent of the company’s total business and Mr Alexander has travelled as far afield as Brussels and Dubai.
“We used to fit Édouard Balladur, the former French prime minister. We had to get a taxi to see him and once the traffic was chocka and we ended up being late, apologising profusely. From then on he’d send an unmarked police car to pick us up. One time the traffic was bad, he stuck his blue light on the roof and we were just gone. Extraordinary.”
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Overcoming time is a different story. The chalk on a customer’s pattern will show his waistline changing over the years and the changing names on Savile Row show how soaring rents threaten the street’s sanctity (Abercrombie and Fitch opened across the street in 2012, to great consternation).
Next year Mr Alexander will hang up his shears. In passing them on to the safe hands of Thomas Pendry, his own former apprentice, he can regard it as his own blessing.
“The biggest thing I’ve learnt is patience. It’s been very satisfying seeing a suit through from a piece of cloth right through to the finished garment, on the person. That’s a privilege.”
Man of the cloth
Tailoring is a craft that’s passed from masters to apprentices (David Waller writes). Thomas Pendry, who grew up and worked on a dairy farm, trained under Alan Alexander.
Now 35, he says that by 26 he was working as a musician and had drifted into part-time jobs before taking a course in bespoke tailoring at Newham College hoping to make a shirt for himself. The course gave him work experience one day a week on Savile Row and Mr Pendry fell in love with the job.
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There is, he says, “an atmosphere of pride and conscientiousness. You’re working with craftsmen who are concerned about reputation and the quality of the product. I thrive in that environment of perfectionism.”
Mr Pendry is working with Adidas on a limited edition fabric and shoe, a project that grew out of a “whimsical idea” suggested by an Adidas employee as he was having a suit fitted. “It’s important to appeal to new demographics where we traditionally might not. There are people out there looking for something different who might not know about our services.”