House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row

by Lance Richardson

  But what about those other bespoke tailors? Amies loved his young neighbor; what did the rest of the Row make of the new arrival?

  Tommy would offer two conflicting accounts, depending on how he wished to present himself at any given moment. In the first version, he was cast as a brave iconoclast overcoming the odds to introduce something new to a hostile land. “When I opened up in my own right…I guess it did alienate me from the traditional Savile Row establishment,” Tommy once claimed. Nutters “was regarded with suspicion” by some of the more longstanding firms—Huntsman, say, which was made to look “rather dowdy” by comparison.

  However, in the second version, Tommy was embraced by his peers as though he were the next Prince of Wales heralding a return of the golden age. “It’s amazing,” he’d say in 1972, “but since we set up here in the Row everyone has been most kind to us, although I’m so young.” By 1980, this forced modesty would give way to calmer self-assurance: “In fact, they were rather nice. I think they needed [Nutters] to lift Savile Row up.”

  More objective accounts suggest Tommy was actually welcomed with cautious optimism. Robert “Bobby” Valentine, who worked next door at No. 9, told Tailor & Cutter: “Nutters is going to be extremely successful because they will continue to bear in mind and maintain the standard and quality expected of tailors in the Row. Tommy has the experience and design ability, and Edward possesses very fine technical qualifications.” He wished them “all the best of luck.”

  Meanwhile, over in Cork Street, Henry Poole & Co. paid respects in its own peculiar way. Though Samuel Cundey saw Tommy as something of an upstart (that long hair!), his son, Angus Cundey, admired Nutters so much that he convinced his father to throw a “stylish brick” through their own obscured frontage and install a see-through window display just three months after Nutters set its unconventional precedent. Angus was soon telling Men’s Wear, “I would like to see this stuffy image removed from the West End, but in doing so we should not forsake our reputation for quality. I want to show that Savile Row keeps up with the times.”

  Indeed, the Row turned out to be mostly on Tommy’s side. After nine years of apprenticeship he was one of them, after all, and could be trusted to modernize the trade without betraying the basic tenets of bespoke.

  Any skepticism he did experience came predominantly from outside—from the media, for instance, which was still pushing (and would continue to push, for decades to come) the idea of an industry in irreversible decline. “Savile Row today is in a rare state of schizophrenia, and looks it,” declared The Daily Telegraph in one characteristic example. “Among other funny things, the street itself has been described as a discotheque in a graveyard. A new generation knows it simply as the place where the Beatles have their headquarters.” Tommy didn’t quite fit into this reductive narrative, so he was condescendingly dismissed, just one of the new “clothes artists” whose shops stood out mostly as “bright parodies of the old style—a sort of Space-Age Regency,” as though the future had no business mingling with a consecrated past.

  * * *

  Tommy had a curious relationship with the press. He was fond of journalists, actively courting them to offer leads and pronouncements and theories and predictions about next year or next decade or what people would be wearing in the year 2000. Yet at the same time, he couldn’t help but subvert them mercilessly, turning interviews upside down with hidden meanings, innuendos, abrupt shifts in tone or direction. Publicity was important to Tommy Nutter, but it was also ridiculous, a parlor game of wits in which the rules of engagement were clear to almost nobody except himself.

  On one occasion, a fashion correspondent observed the cuffs, or turn-ups, on Tommy’s tweed trousers and asked him if this meant turn-ups were “making a comeback.” Tommy bristled at the line of inquiry. Going “all formal,” he replied, “That’s the sort of question I don’t want to answer.” It went “against the grain,” he said. Having thus thrown the correspondent completely off-balance, he then answered the question anyway: “I think people will wear what they like…I certainly don’t think turn-ups are coming back”—even though, yes, he happened to be wearing them.

  Another time, a writer would ask about his clientele. What kind of people shopped at Nutters? “Don’t ask me for a list of names,” Tommy replied, saying this particular line of questioning was “too naff” to be countenanced. However, he continued, naff was actually his “favourite word,” and probably destined to be the Word of the ’70s. Writing it down, the journalist asked him for a definition. Stone-faced, Tommy said it was difficult to explain…as though he weren’t perfectly aware that naff was camp slang for “boring,” or “straight,” or even (though perhaps apocryphally) “not available for fucking”—that is, NAFF.

  Nevertheless, while Tommy enjoyed tying the media in knots, he was also determined to get good press. In late July, just five months after Nutters opened, The Guardian sent a columnist named Fiona MacCarthy to conduct an interview in the showroom. “Are you sure the sleeve’s not wrinkled?” Tommy fussed as he posed for a picture by the interior front window. The suit he was wearing, he explained to the photographer, looked best when he was standing, not sitting. MacCarthy observed this pantomime from the sidelines. “He is very, very worried in case the camera catches him not looking quite his best,” she wrote. “He is careful, oh so careful, about how the jacket’s hanging and how the collar’s sitting and the sharpness of his creases.” She then asked, “But can anyone, even a top tailor, really truly always look completely perfect? Does he never once let up?”

  “Well, yes,” Tommy admitted sheepishly. There were times “when nobody’s looking” that he might climb out of bed in the morning and pull on a pair of denim jeans.

  MacCarthy was amused. This “vision of reality,” she finished dryly, must “restore one’s faith in human nature. Even Thomas Nutter can’t be bothered all the time.”

  The album cover of Abbey Road (1969), by Iain Macmillan.

  It was a clear, humid day in early August when a Scottish photographer named Iain Macmillan climbed a stepladder in the middle of a street in Saint John’s Wood. As he fiddled with his Hasselblad, a policeman directed traffic, and the Beatles stood by the side of the road, impatient to get things over with. Linda McCartney snapped some behind-the-scenes shots. Paul adjusted the collar on Ringo’s frock coat. Finally, they began to march, back and forth, over the crosswalk, while Macmillan snapped a few frames: John out front, dressed in eye-catching white, followed by Ringo, Paul, and George in a solemn procession. “Come on, hurry up now, keep in step,” John barked. Too many people were hanging around for his liking, and he wanted to be back in the studio finishing the album, “not posing for Beatles pictures.” After a few crossings, they paused to readjust. Paul lit a cigarette and kicked off his sandals. Later, conspiracy theorists would notice he’d gone barefoot, and notice, too, the VW Beetle parked in the background, and somehow deduce that all this was a secret visual code signifying that Paul McCartney was actually dead, and portrayed here by a body double. Really, he was just wilting in the heat and didn’t feel like wearing shoes. The navy blue double-breasted suit was quite enough, thank you.

  McCartney would eventually select the fifth of six photographs Macmillan took that day for the album cover of Abbey Road—the one with their legs perfectly synchronized, midstride. George Harrison looked casual in his jeans and open-neck oxford shirt, but the other three matched in elegant bespoke. This was pure coincidence; nobody had told them to all dress in Nutters. Indeed, they’d just turned up wearing what they wanted to wear, the clothes that best expressed how they felt at that particular moment, when a hopeful decade was taking its final breaths, preparing to give way to a far more ambivalent one.

  * * *

  Within the first six months of opening, Nutters of Savile Row did the business Tommy had expected in a year. Within the first year, they sold more than 1,000 suits, about 470 of them to Am
ericans who seemed to have no qualms about dropping $230 (about $1,450 in today’s currency) for “the Nutter line, and the Nutter cut and the Nutter fit and the Nutter style and the Nutter flair and the Nutter feel and the Nutter cloth.” In the cutting room, Edward struggled to keep up with the pace. “It’s been very hard work since we started here,” he told a reporter, a black-and-white tape measure curling around his neck. “Long hours and everything. Very long hours.” Tommy complained that he no longer had time to do many of his favorite things. When he did find an evening to visit Covent Garden for a performance of Giselle, the French ballet in which men are forced to dance until they die from exhaustion, he moaned theatrically, as though he too were being worked straight into the grave: “I haven’t been for ages. I’m out of touch…”

  By 1970, Tommy was boasting in his promotional literature that Nutters had already been mentioned by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, Carson having asked more than one of his high-profile guests where they’d bought their unusual suit and been told, “Tommy Nutter.” The patronage of Cilla Black and the Beatles was invaluable, of course, but there was a longer list that revealed the breadth of his appeal: Eric Clapton, Peter Sellers, Lionel Bart, Kenneth Tynan, Tommy Tune, the Duke of Bedford, Leonore Annenberg, Pattie Boyd, and even Nancy Reagan, First Lady of California—or “Mrs. Ronald Reagan,” as a press release referred to her. Robert Stigwood, the Australian entrepreneur and manager of the Bee Gees, had ordered eight summer suits in mohairs, silks, and light worsteds. Twiggy had one made in crushed tomato velvet. David Hockney had a tweed check suit made in something like the color of healthy gums, which he allowed Cecil Beaton to photograph him wearing with an op-art tie and mismatched socks (red and green). Once, a cutter at Nutters asked Hockney how he managed to achieve his rakish, crumpled look. Hockney replied, “I don’t have any hangers in my wardrobe.”

  Prince Rajsinh of Rajpipla, son of the Maharaja of Rajpipla, a former princely state in the west of India, first noticed Nutters in a newspaper and stopped in because he wanted something fresh. “Pippy,” as his friends called him, soon commissioned a full range of clothes, including a contemporary twist on Indian formalwear: a modified Nehru-collar tunic that doubled as a dinner jacket. He was particularly taken with Tommy’s method of working with his client. “He would stand there and sketch something in two minutes, every detail,” Pippy recalls. “You’d never seen anything like it. It was a gift. ‘Do you like this? You like that?’ Tear it up! ‘Now, what about this?’ ”

  Between trips to the racetrack, where Pippy preferred to spend his days, he became tight friends with Tommy and began accompanying him and Peter to restaurants like Provans, a fashionable eatery that had recently opened in a disused ladder storeroom next to Brompton Cemetery. Hidden up a rickety staircase, pop stars and influencers crowded together on rattan furniture in a narrow, unpretentious dining room, leaning over smoked haddock soufflés and giant platters of fresh vegetables that teetered precariously on bright yellow tablecloths. Thanks to its amiable host, Stewart Grimshaw, Provans soon became another crucial advertisement for Nutters: the slender, long-haired Scotsman would amass more than two hundred suits over the course of a few years, and share the name of his tailor whenever it was requested by one of his guests. As Grimshaw recalls, “Tommy was prepared to indulge one’s whim.”

  And his own, inevitably. The relative restraint of Tony King’s original suit quickly gave way to more ostentatious flights of fancy. For example, a green velvet jacket with brocade lapels. A reversible tweed coat with candy-orange trim. A gray-and-gold shooting suit. A waistcoat made from dozens of colored patches painstakingly hand-stitched together. An evening jacket with an Art Deco shawl collar in white, green, and burgundy. A biscuit-and-black checked worsted Norfolk jacket, paired with puffy knickerbockers, for the man about town. Tommy made a signature out of braiding coats with grosgrain or Petersham ribbon, which outlined modern elements like the vast lapels and made them stand out even more brazenly. He also began to experiment with contrasting patterns and materials, so that a coat made from one thing might feature patch pockets and trim made from something entirely different, velvet and tweed, pinstripes offsetting a Tattersall check. Even on suits where the pattern was uniform, Tommy might turn it on the bias for flaps and pockets, making stripes go one way = and then another way // and then another way || to induce a sense of sartorial vertigo. “A tailor should not be scared of giving his customers styles which may seem a little outrageous,” he claimed, adding that the two essentials for success were “creativity and courage.”

  Tommy combined contrasting patterns and materials on a single coat.

  Checks might be turned on the bias to induce a sense of sartorial vertigo.

  By its first anniversary, Nutters was being described without irony in the Daily Mail as “the place for men’s clothes…a whizz-bang success.” Meanwhile, Tommy was “now in the class of actor Terence Stamp, photographer Brian Duffy, and hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, all the stylish young Londoners who have shot themselves out of their backgrounds and into the new aristocracy.” Within just twelve months, Tommy had transformed himself from a frustrated salesman with zero clout into an innovator who was being compared with defining figures of the era: a talented, preternaturally lucky peacock who bridged the gap between classic British tailor (praised by his peers as “one of the best”) and men’s fashion designer.

  For nearly a decade, Tommy had dreamed about dressing people “the way I like to see them looking,” about a look that “changes people’s personality” into what he thought they should be: graceful, liberated, and bold. In Tommy’s view, the hype and success that greeted Nutters was irrefutable proof that “what I thought was good everyone else liked.” It vindicated his instincts, only making him more confident. “What I am doing is what I want to do,” he affirmed. “It’s very nice to be able to live it all for real.”

  * * *

  Nutters of Savile Row may have been an instant hit among the famous and fashionable, but it was not reserved for their exclusive use. Indeed, the early order books were filled with “a comprehensive cross section of the public,” including lawyers, doctors, accountants, and bankers. To cater to this demographic, Nutters also offered what Edward called “Block Two,” a somewhat quieter silhouette, less deliberately exaggerated, for professionals who wanted to be seen patronizing a trendy tailor without subverting conventions in the workplace too much. These were wealthy men, mostly self-made, who liked the quality of the past but felt no allegiance to its fusty stylings. At least two of them were over seventy years old.

  Peter Sprecher, a young investment banker on vacation from Los Angeles, was walking down Savile Row in shorts and a T-shirt when he did a double take outside No. 35a. Framed in the window was, Sprecher recalls, “this crazy suit”: navy blue, pink lapels, with flared pants in a box plaid. He had never been to a tailor before—“never even thought about it”—but he was mesmerized by what he was seeing. He marched into the showroom and announced his intention to purchase the window display.

  Tommy explained that it wasn’t for sale.

  Sprecher was confused. “Well, how much is it?” he asked. “I want to buy it.”

  “No, let me explain,” Tommy said. “We’re bespoke—”

  “But listen, I just want to buy the suit,” Sprecher said, cutting him off. “So what do I have to do?”

  Tommy said that there had to be several fittings, at least three, and that it would be quite expensive.

  Sprecher was undeterred. “OK, fine, I’ll take it,” he said.

  “No, let me explain,” Tommy repeated. “We can’t make the pattern just for one suit. You have to buy three suits.”

  Three suits? Nobody needed three suits in California.

  Tommy shrugged. “It’s a three-suit minimum.”

  Sprecher placed the order. It was only later that he realized the “three-suit minimum” was
bogus, that Tommy was probably testing him because of the way he was dressed.

  When the suits were finished, any indignation he may have felt at being hoodwinked immediately dissolved. “They were absolutely the most beautiful suits I’ve ever seen, before or since,” Sprecher recalls. A little too warm for Los Angeles, but so stunning he would wear them anyway, with mini-platform shoes beneath the flares. As he strutted down the street, people would stare, mouths open. Sprecher didn’t care. “How do I say this? It made me feel that I was really dressed. Like I was wearing a piece of art.”

  * * *

  Back in the 1830s, nearly 140 years before any of this happened, Henry George Poole had been a young dilettante less interested in the technicalities of his father’s tailoring business than in the hedonistic pleasures of London high society. Henry worked in the back room, assisting the head cutter; his heart, though, was set on the kind of lives enjoyed by the sons of gentlemen—on drawing rooms and fox hunts over sprawling country estates. James Poole was exasperated by his son’s dreaminess, but he decided to make the best of a bad situation. He outfitted Henry in elegant bespoke, then sent him off to stalk the society he so craved in a bid to lure new clients back to the family business. Soon, before he was twenty-one years old, Henry was driving through Hyde Park in his own horse-drawn phaeton. He was attending the Albrighton Hunt, then the Quorn Hunt. One night after dinner, over a game of billiards at the Earl of Stamford’s house, he spied a guest wearing a badly made coat and used a piece of cue chalk to mark up corrections, telling the gentleman to take it to his father back in London for improvements. Charming and audacious, Henry Poole had known how to work a room. He understood the value in working a room. And he was so successful in his gambit that he would one day find himself at Compiègne, in the court of Napoleon III, with many people, the emperor included, wearing his clothes.