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.