Bespoke: Savile Row Ripped and Smoothed, by RICHARD ANDERSON.
London: Simon and Schuster. 2009. 320pp. Hbk. £14.99.
ISBN: 978-84737-454-7.

This book is an interesting and entertainingly written autobiography by the head of one of the newest tailoring businesses in London’s Savile Row, Richard Anderson Ltd.

The author describes how he started at 16 in the prestigious firm of Huntsman and how he learnt the business of becoming a cutter, the most crucial person in any bespoke tailors.

He describes all the processes needed to construct a bespoke garment from the initial measuring of the client to the pressing and dispatch of the finished garments. All the various workshops and their techniques are lovingly detailed without it becoming overwhelming.

Woven into it is his own personal story and it is full of vignettes of some of the various characters he has met in the workshops and as clients. The first onslaught against the older traditions of men’s tailoring and dress started in the 1960s.

The author, who started work in Savile Row in the 1980s, caught the last vestige of the traditional methods that had been built up during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but no firm could be complacent and the tailors had to adapt, the latter two decades of the twentieth century bringing their own problems, including recessions and hostile takeovers.

It was one of these takeovers that prompted the author to leave and start his own business, together with some of the other members of Huntsman’s.

The timing might not have been brilliant, on 11th. September 2001 he was sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow waiting to take off for a trip to see clients in the States, but the firm has survived and expanded, attracting new clients to the arcane world of the bespoke garment.

This book is a good introduction to the technical aspects of tailoring and one of the best written on the topic. It is also a ‘good read’. It is not illustrated, which is a disappointment, but there is a 30 page glossary of tailoring terms and an index.

One question remains though, what happened to the archives of Huntsmans?

NAOMI E.A. TARRANT