In all your life, you go to Savile Row, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly, to spend seven or eight thousand euros on a suit made to measure with the best wool, linen or cotton, to have your measurements taken as if you were a lord. , an admiral in the Navy or a member of the royal family, and emerge as a dandy in the style of Daniel Craig or Hugh Grant. Because to eat a salad or have a coffee there are many other places and also quite close.
However, now the legendary Savile Row, the street of tailors par excellence for three hundred years, is in danger of losing its identity. The company that owns some of the buildings (The Pollen Estate) intends to renovate numbers 17 to 20 to convert them into art galleries, mini-malls, cafes, restaurants and ordinary clothing stores, of which there are in all the centers of the cities.
The affair has accelerated the existential crisis that Savile Row has been suffering for some time due to the disappearance of some of its most emblematic tailors. Twenty-one establishments that have survived the pandemic continue to operate on the street and now – while waiting for the coming recession – they are registering a kind of mini-boom, because the rise in the price of electricity and the shopping basket has never been an impediment for those who buy a custom-made suit to continue doing so, it would be missing more. It is a market like that of Aston Martins, luxury apartments on the Côte d’Azur, yachts and private planes, a world parallel to that of the ordinary economy.
But not completely, due to changes in habits in society and complex financial frameworks. The demand for formal wear has decreased, causing classic establishments such as Abrecrombie
These are changing times, full of uncertainty, also in Savile Row. The request for the remodeling of numbers 17 to 20 is pending the approval of the pertinent urban planning permits, as they are considered historic buildings (the idea is to move the tailor shops that are now at street level to the first floor, and in the ground floor to put cafes, galleries and restaurants that appeal to a less exclusive public). But as often happens, the neighbors are divided. Some think it’s time to diversify and become a bit more popular, and that it doesn’t hurt to attract tourists and a clientele that isn’t necessarily interested in spending ten thousand euros on a suit, no matter how three-piece it is. Others put tradition, DNA and the defense of identity first. It is largely a generational issue.
It used to be said that the first rule of those who dressed in Savile Row was not to mention Savile Row. Either they knew it was the place to make a suit, or they didn’t. It was a word of mouth affair, information passed automatically from father to son, a secret of the aristocrats best not shared with the vulgar middle classes (who already had Regent Street and Oxford Street). Giorgio Armani set up the marimorena a few years ago by saying that it was “an English comedy, a melodrama anchored in the past”.
Historically, Savile Row was where students from Eton and Oxford went to get their first suits made, ladies of high society to have a summer dress to wear to the Glyndebourne Opera House, viceroys of India to get clothes suitable for the tropical climate and explorers like Livingstone and Stanley before embarking on their travels. The clientele has changed, and now they are also Chinese actors, footballers and tourists, but something of the spirit remains. Changing tailor shops for pizzerias would undoubtedly be a great revolution.
