Which Side Do You Dress?
Of the many small indignities that we have to suffer in life, perhaps one of the most expensive and deflating is our first visit to a bespoke tailor—particularly one of those London tailors whose forebears made breeches for Lord Nelson or moiré hunting underwear for the Prince Regent. There they stand, these lords of the cloth, corseted in sixteen-ounce worsted, surrounded by mahogany wainscoting and framed bills (probably still unpaid) for Oscar Wilde’s frock coats, waiting for innocents like you and me who feel the urge for a handmade suit.
They run a polite but disparaging eye over you and what you have always thought to be your smartest outfit, worn specially for the occasion. “Yes,” they murmur eventually, “I think we can do a little better than that.”
Having destroyed your suit, they settle down to the serious business of recording your physical curiosities. This is a practised double act: the man with the tape measure and the cryptic comments, and his scribe, who notes your defects in a large book, already bulging with past deformities. It isn’t overtly insulting. It’s simply as if you were a deaf, inanimate and inconveniently shaped object to be shrouded as tastefully as possible.
Many of the comments are unfamiliar. None of them sounds flattering. Trying desperately to remain impassive, you eavesdrop and hear about things you never knew you had: a dropped left shoulder, a slipped chest, slight lordosis in the lower back, the suspicion of a hump, legs of unequal length—“Do we normally stand like that, sir?”—and several other revelations too ghastly to commit to print.
By this time, your main concern is to get to a doctor as quickly as possible, but duty calls. You must now choose your cloth and make vital decisions about buttons, flaps, vents, lapels, stitching—all those delightfully arcane details that make a handmade suit so much more satisfying than clothes tailored in a factory. It should be a deeply enjoyable experience, lasting for an hour or two and leaving you in the mood for a glass of champagne. But unfortunately, the shock of discovering that you are nothing but a human potato with posture problems has left you demoralised, with your decisive powers in paralysis. Feeble and unprotesting, you are steered firmly by the tailor into the standard establishment suit. Better made, certainly, than your previous suits, but somehow not quite what you had in mind.
After my first handmade suit, I retired, hurt, for several years. And yet, every once in a while, the urge would return to spend a morning among the swatches and discuss horn buttons with someone sympathetic who wouldn’t make me feel like a basket case with a cheque book.
Did such a tailor exist? Yes, he did, according to George, the elegant London antique dealer. George and his tailor had a rapport that went far beyond the perfunctory measuring of an inside leg and the exchange of clothes for money. George and his tailor were friends, and George’s suits were the best-looking I had ever seen. I wanted one. No, I wanted half a dozen. Most of all, I wanted a tailor I could feel at ease with. And so I took my dropped left shoulder, my lordosis and my legs of unequal length along to 95 Mount Street in Mayfair to meet Douglas Hayward.
His shop is in complete contrast to the wainscoting and dusty-relic school of decor still favoured by the elders of the tailoring business. It’s more like a living room, except that the shelves are filled with shirts and ties and sweaters instead of books. There are invariably one or two people sitting round exchanging jokes and insults. Music comes from the cutting room in the back. Anguished phone calls come from clients who have had one lunch too many and need their trousers let out. Black London cabs come to ferry suits to Claridges or the Dorchester or the Los Angeles flight from Heathrow. Sales representatives come for a five-minute call with their wool and linen and cashmere and leather, and stay for half an hour and a cup of tea. It is not in the least daunting, and I say that as one who’s daunted very easily.
Hayward himself is as relaxed as his shop. Unlike most tailors, who wear suits of such rigid perfection that they don’t look real, he is handsomely dressed in clothes that can clearly cope with the normal range of bodily movements. (Some English tailors, to this day, are so conscious of their heritage of eighteenth century military tailoring that their suits are only really happy when standing at attention.)
The next pleasant surprise is that you are never aware of being inspected for sartorial crimes. You can turn up for a fitting in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt without raising any eyebrows. I once saw a customer dressed only in a shirt, tie and jacket, having a cup of coffee while his trousers were being pressed in the back room. In this sort of atmosphere, it is almost impossible not to feel at home. The process of ordering a suit is therefore what it should be—that is, informal, friendly, and unhurried. It happens more or less like this.
Your first visit will probably last about an hour. Most of this time will be spent chatting with Hayward. By the time the tape measure finally comes out, he will have some ideas about cloth and cut. Unless you have very precise requirements—and most men don’t—it is always best to go along with what he suggests. Someone has to be in charge of the suit, and he’s better at it than you are.
He takes you into the back to be measured. The process is as devoid of trauma as anything involving waist measurement can be, because by now you’re discussing the respective merits of hopsack or flannel, raised seams, side vents, concealed ticket pockets and that most intimate of matters—whether your genitals prefer to be housed to the east or the west of the zip. In tailoring language, this is called dressing to the left or the right, and an extra accommodation is made in the appropriate trouser leg. As you can imagine, with all this going on, you are far too busy to notice the muttered instructions that are being jotted down in the book. The ordeal by tape measure is painless.
With the measurements taken, the cloth chosen and the style agreed upon, you leave Hayward to get on with it. He cuts your pattern and the actual material. His assistants assemble and stitch. Suits are made on the premises. (In fact, having served his time as a tailor’s apprentice, Hayward can make the entire suit by himself, which is rare and becoming rarer. There are now only four tailors’ apprentices in the West End of London, where there were once hundreds.)
A month or so goes by, and then you come back for the first fitting. This can be surprising unless you know what to expect, because no sooner are you casting a discreetly admiring eye at your reflection in the mirror than Hayward pounces on you, mouth bristling with pins, and rips the sleeves from the jacket. There follows a few hectic minutes of adjusting and pinning and scrawling hieroglyphics here and there on the suit with tailor’s chalk before he stands back in the manner of a sculptor casting a critical eye over a promising but unfinished chunk of marble. One final twitch of the chalk, and you and your suit part company until the next fitting. The suit will now be taken apart completely, seams pressed flat, adjustments made according to the coded chalk marks and then put together again, this time with the finished hand stitching that is one of the subtle but unmistakable marks of bespoke tailoring. A second fitting takes care of any vestigial tucks and wrinkles. (The entire process requires about six weeks, less for subsequent orders. Informal deliveries are made to the United States whenever Hayward goes to New York or Los Angeles. He usually arrives with twenty suits over his arm for American clients.)
Then the suit’s all yours. You don’t even have to look in the mirror. It feels right. It feels comfortable. What it doesn’t feel is new. There is minimal padding in the shoulders, and none of that stiff and cumbersome upholstery around the chest that makes so many London stockbrokers look like stuffed pinstriped fish. That’s not to say your suit will be, in the currently fashionable way, ‘unconstructed.’ It will have a graceful, almost fleshy roll to the lapel. It will sit smoothly on your shoulders. It will fit snugly at the back of the neck, where poorly cut suits always have a ridge. The buttons on the sleeves will undo, as buttons should. There will be a tiny loop behind the left lapel to anchor the stem of the carnation in your buttonhole. In other words, it will be a very constructed suit. But comfortable.
It will also make you look slightly thinner and an inch or two taller than you look in less well fitting suits. And as long as you don’t want to look like a rumpled parachute one season and an extra from Brideshead Revisited the next, you will be wearing your suit with increasing pleasure over the next fifteen or twenty years. It won’t date. Hayward doesn’t make extreme clothes.
Alas, he doesn’t make inexpensive clothes, either. Suit prices start at about £800, jackets at £500. Which brings us to the one area where Hayward and traditional tailors have something in common. When I asked him what was the single most difficult part of making suits for gentlemen, he didn’t hesitate for a second. “Getting paid,” he said. It is ever thus between men and tailors.