Tommy told people that he felt privileged to become a member of the team at KFS. He meant it too. A journalist, observing him in Dover Street, noted that he seemed “a shade awed” by his new surroundings: “Tommy is sure that he’ll fit in, he’s only been there six weeks to date, but—no trouble.” Because Lincroft Kilgour was a giant conglomerate with smart people taking care of the money side of things, Tommy had high hopes for his future. “I will not have the responsibilities of worrying about overheads and will get down to the business of creating my own look,” he said.
Still, it was a strange fit, KFS and Tommy Nutter—a “piquant mixture,” as The Times put it, of conservative old-timers and the iconoclast who had once opened a shop that aimed to supersede them. Capturing a widely shared opinion, Angus McGill in the Evening Standard commented that the “hushed anonymity” of Dover Street was “not the place you would expect to find the starry and very individual Mr Nutter.”
Tommy would have agreed with this assessment. Years later, he’d sit down to jot some preliminary notes for an autobiography in which he’d recall his entrance to KFS as an act of high-farce gate crashing.
“He’s not a member of the chorus—he’s a STAR,” said Mr. Tremble as he introduced the ‘new boy’ to Kilgour, French & Stanbury.
Miss Worth of the venomous tongue was writing out her tickets as usual, but [was] very much ‘put out’ by the arrival of the added member of staff. After all, things had been running very well without him. You could see the horror on her face as she conjured up the image of Elton John walking into such a hallowed establishment, perhaps waiting on the Chesterfield alongside Lord [?] for Mr. Nutter to discuss his trousseau for a forthcoming tour…
This was Jubilee year, and I had been away from my own business Nutters of Savile Row for nearly a year now, and found that funds were becoming exceedingly low. Therefore it was a case of starting at the bottom again, and working my way up through the company which had in fact ruled the roost in the tailoring world for all the impresarios, actors, advertising [men] and the less conventional types of Savile Row client until I had opened my own shop in 1969. And this is where one starts.
* * *
Tommy knew that he needed to show some humility to the older staff at KFS. To avoid any repeats of the unpleasantness at Nutters, he declared his intention, straight up, “to get in there and create an understanding with the cutters.” He emphasized that this was “not a case of Tommy Nutter going in…to reorganize Kilgour and save it.” As a show of respect, a sign of his deference to tradition, he adjusted his personal style to something more serious-looking, subtle pinstripes and various shades of battleship gray. One observer would describe him as going from “avant to old guard” almost overnight. Tommy also altered his tone toward the media. Gone were the bold prophecies of change; instead, he declared that the company’s classic cut from the 1940s was now “the new look.” He tightened the seat of the trousers to make them a little more flattering, yes, but the silhouette was left otherwise untouched: a drape suit, double-breasted, with built-out chest, moderate lapels, no flaps, and no fuss. This he anointed the modified “Robert Mitchum look,” perhaps because the name emphasized continuity with a reassuring golden age. He did not want to spook the horses straight out of the gate.
After a short run of this, however, when people had gotten used to his presence, when Tommy had figured out the hierarchy and who wielded the real power at KFS, he dropped the pretense and began to exert his true will. The Dover Street showroom was fusty and cluttered. Bolts of cloth were stacked up alongside a riot of leather goods, dressing gowns, umbrellas, and ties. Workers tottered about with tape measures around their necks and pins sticking out of their mouths. It was all decidedly unglamorous—and Tommy yearned to fix it. On August 11, he wrote to his brother about “the new accessories department” that would sweep it all out for a much-needed fresh start. He had talked management into a radical makeover. “The whole of the front area of the shop will be a sort of mini Gucci, and all the bespoke goes in to the back area. This has all been paneled and has chandeliers etc.—all very grand! I shall be flitting around posing and trying to get the whole thing together.”
So much for not reorganizing Kilgour.
“We are slowly creating a new atmosphere,” Tommy boasted, barely seven months after first arriving. “The stuffiness should soon go.”
* * *
It is difficult to know what the other members of staff really made of the “new boy.” Michael Smith, a tailor who worked at KFS during Tommy’s tenure, recalls him as “just a figurehead.” Yet the directors of Lincroft Kilgour were at least moderately aligned with Tommy’s opinion of his own transformative abilities. With his star-studded contact list and media pull, he was brought in to “add a new dimension” to the aging clientele. Which he did, almost immediately: Elton John was indeed waiting on a Chesterfield (having loyally followed him across from Nutters), along with Eric Clapton, Lord Montagu, and the Marquess of Tavistock. Tommy could successfully instigate the makeover of the Dover Street showroom because the conglomerate directors saw him as a cash cow. As Angus McGill wryly observed, “I understand they mean to use Nutter to cure the nation’s balance of payments deficit.”
In fact, Lincroft Kilgour’s plan for Tommy consisted of two parts. First, he would design for longstanding KFS customers (“they want only gradual change”), as well as his own loyal clientele (“my customers want my look and they trust me to give it to them”). In doing so, he would draw on and promote other subsidiaries within the Lincroft Kilgour group, including the cloth merchant Holland & Sherry.
Second and simultaneously, Tommy would also work to become, as he himself put it, “the top menswear designer in Great Britain”—a natural successor to Hardy Amies, whom he suddenly began citing in interviews as his guiding light.
In 1959, Amies had signed on as a design consultant for Hepworths, a mass-production tailoring firm (called a “multiple” tailors) that owned numerous stores across the country’s high streets. Amies was already famous by then, having opened his atelier on Savile Row and made dresses for the queen. By enlisting his support, Hepworths hoped to borrow Amies’s prestige to elevate the social value of its budget clothes—to, in effect, create an illusory link between the “bank clerks and office workers” who patronized Hepworths and “the world of corgis and garden parties.” Amies was a terrible snob, but he liked money, and he relished the opportunity to branch into menswear. “Our courage paid off,” he later wrote. Though his initial designs were mostly unremarkable (featuring a masculine line “a bit like an hourglass,” in the words of Nik Cohn, and colors that ranged from drab gray to beige), they proved a sensation at the end of the austere 1950s. Starved of anything with even a little bit of shape, male customers could not get enough. Hepworths watched its profits double in the space of four years to more than a million pounds. And Amies, having turned his name into a hot commodity, found himself enriched by more than a dozen new consultancy deals—including hats for Battersby, pajamas for Bonsoir, sweaters and socks for Byford of Leicester, and men’s gloves for Dent, Allcroft & Co. He “virtually pioneered” the Chelsea boot for Clarks, according to Rodney Bennett-England; he also created an original clothing line under his own label, which was distributed by Genesco throughout the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Japan.
In short, Amies had elevated himself into a one-man brand of considerable international standing. This had been Tommy’s goal for years, but now he had serious support behind him in the form of Lincroft Kilgour. “What they want to do with me here is to turn me into the new Hardy Amies,” he said.
Once the makeover of Dover Street was finished, Tommy and his employers set out to pursue their objective aggressively. At the beginning of 1978, Lincroft Kilgour formed a limited company called Tommy Nutter Promotions. The directors then placed advertisements in industry trade publications that invited licensing pro
posals to use the Tommy Nutter label.
Tommy Nutter would like to work for you 24 hours a day!
In April, Tommy traveled to America with KFS cutters to collect new orders from their clients. In New York—between nights out with his brother to the Anvil or Cock Ring—he spent his free time trying to line up a deal between Tommy Nutter Promotions and a “big name” department store like Saks Fifth Avenue. Tommy promised “the traditional Savile Row suit,” but slimmed down, with “a little flair” to set the wearer apart from the crowd. Ideally, he wanted a dedicated “Tommy Nutter shop” within one of these department stores for which he would personally design suits, shirts, ties, and “whatever else the store wants.” He visited Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston on the trip, telling wholesalers in each city that he would design in London but manufacture all-American. He received no enthusiastic bites.
More headway was made at home. The trade advertisements led to several letters of inquiry (“I must stress again that design is our main interest,” one buyer wrote, “not just the application of a name on Tommy Nutter’s merchandise”)—and at least one serious offer, from the fashion retailer Austin Reed.
Austin Reed’s flagship store was located on Regent Street, which positioned it, with fitting symbolism, right between Savile Row and Carnaby Street. Aimed firmly at the middle class, it offered quality and affordability, made-to-measure precision at the cost of ready-to-wear. It was a dependable source of sensible men’s clothes, but it was not afraid to try new things, keeping up with the trends. In 1965, it had hired a fashion editor from Town magazine to launch an in-store menswear boutique called the Cue Shop, which offered everything from highwaymen coats to bell-bottom hipster trousers. The target demographic was the “bachelor about town,” those young executives with plenty of disposable income and a taste for extravagance. In this respect, Cue had proved a smart bet; by the time Tommy opened Nutters in 1969, there were fifty-six Cue Shops in Britain and plans for even more. Austin Reed had struck an ideal balance between tradition and fashion—had, in a sense, succeeded in doing exactly what Tommy had done, but at a price point that appealed to the everyman. There was an obvious symmetry of ambition between Austin Reed and the tailor.
In May, Tommy met with Graeme Tonge, controller for the Cue Shops, and came to an agreement. “I was extremely pleased with our meeting yesterday and feel confident that we will produce a stunning collection,” he wrote to Tonge afterward.
Tommy was decidedly less confident in another letter to his brother, admitting that he found the job of conceiving looks for a future season “quite difficult,” because he was used to working as though his designs were timeless. It required a serious adjustment to think up collections that would come and go with the brutal frequency of weather. Still, he seemed to be “getting along quite well so far,” and he’d just been given a tour around the Austin Reed factory in Kent, which delighted him: “I felt like the Queen. All I needed was a bouquet.”
Samples for the Tommy Nutter collection went into production in August. When they were finished, Tommy was “absolutely thrilled” with the result. His intention had been to create “the Savile Row cut” as ready-to-wear, extending the flattering benefits of bespoke to a wider audience: dropped shoulders, generous sleeves, a draped chest, narrow lapels, and (because God is in the details) genuine horn buttons. His Cue range would also include cable-knit sweaters in Shetland wool, tab-collar dress shirts, and an entire line of fetching ties. A complete Tommy Nutter look.
Just before Cue unveiled the collection publicly the following March, for spring 1979, Tommy circulated a press release that summarized his grand (yet geographically muddled) vision like this: “Shades in pale earth colors are reminiscent of the glamorous days of the 20s and 30s at Deauville, strolling along the Croisette before changing to visit the Casino.” He listed his inspirations as Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, and Erté, the Russian-born French father of Art Deco. The unifying theme of everything was “elegance,” Tommy wrote—“a new feeling for the British male.”
* * *
When it finally hit the streets, the Cue collection drew exactly the kind of attention that Tommy and his backers were hoping for. “Not since Hepworths signed up Hardy Amies in the early 1960s and launched him on his ‘total man’ package has any other British retailing group really attempted to repeat the exercise,” David Harvey wrote in Men’s Wear. The reviews were favorable too. Sure, the Cue suits were understated for a Tommy Nutter production, even “amazingly conventional.” But perhaps that was a good thing: you didn’t need to be Mick Jagger to pull off these styles. In quick succession, Tommy was vaulted up The Sunday Telegraph’s “IN” list. He was described by Style as one of the British menswear industry’s “leading lights,” and as a “shooting star” by Tatler & Bystander. Meanwhile, in a more ambiguous honor, Harpers & Queen placed him on a list of “tradesmen grander than their customers.”
Tommy Nutter designs for the Cue Shop, 1979.
All this praise promised excellent things—as did the fact that Austin Reed had already secured his commitment for future seasons at Cue. Tony Holland, the chairman of Lincroft Kilgour, began to rub his hands together with avaricious excitement. “Mr Holland has not lost sight of Austin Reed’s financial links with the American clothing giant Hart Schaffner and Marx, who themselves run an Austin Reed line in the States,” a journalist noted.
And yet, in Tommy’s view, not all was as it should be in the world around him. He was not content. Partly this had to do with the Dover Street showroom, still frustratingly passé despite his best efforts to bring a bit of modern flair. More than once in letters to David, Tommy would liken KFS to Are You Being Served?, the BBC sitcom about an old-fashioned department store called Grace Brothers, populated by class-obsessed, clueless, petulant, or mincing staff members who pepper their speech with double-entendres and make constant mistakes. Because he was now an employee, Tommy was immersed in this stupefying atmosphere all day, every day, unable to escape.
But even worse—what was really bothering Tommy—was a kind of phantom pain: Nutters of Savile Row, still open and trading in 1979. As Tommy sought to leverage his name as an exclusive label, Edward Sexton and his cutters continued to use it freely on their windows just around the corner. People got confused; Tommy was annoyed. As soon as he arrived at KFS, he’d begun slinking past No. 35a to make surreptitious assessments of his old firm’s health: “I think the Nutters girls are now just beginning to feel the pinch—they are busy but I don’t think that things are running too smoothly at the moment.” This bitter assessment, relayed to his brother in New York, was based on nothing more substantial than wishful thinking. In fact, Nutters post-Tommy was actually doing relatively well.
But it was no longer quite the same place that Tommy once knew. After his vanishing act, Edward had assumed the role of managing director, just as he’d wanted, and he’d reoriented the company away from an innovative fashion house toward a more dependable tailoring model. “Savile Row is a fine line between fashion and tradition,” Edward explained to the writer Iain Finlayson. “I am entirely practical: I was brought up in tailoring, and I have a commercial spirit. I enjoy designing innovative fashion, but it must be appropriate to our clients’ personalities.” This reorientation—effectively choosing to be led by the client, rather than the whim of a lead designer—was exactly what Edward had been encouraging Tommy to do before their fateful rupture.
Nutters also looked different. The cutting room and fitting area had been enlarged, which necessitated a change in décor. Edward had hired a new freelance window dresser named Simon Doonan (the same young man who’d once watched Tommy walking around on his lunch breaks looking like “an old illustration of Art Deco glamour”). As Doonan recalls, “Somebody said to me, ‘Tommy Nutter’s had a fight with his partner and left. And they need a person to do the windows now because Michael Long also left with Tommy out of solid
arity.’ So I zoomed in there! I met Edward Sexton. Edward and I bonded immediately. He was hilarious—very cockney, very straight, but he knew Polari, too, because he learned it from Tommy. Everything was bona and eek…” Because Doonan was influenced by the punk movement—Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood were doing a brisk trade in safety pins and rubber ties over on the King’s Road—he filled the windows of Nutters with a striking new aesthetic. In his most notorious display, trash cans and stuffed rats wearing diamanté chokers (“I just bought some trim from John Lewis and stitched it on myself”) were arranged around beautiful bespoke dinner jackets. This kind of high/low tableau was so eye-catchingly deranged it would ultimately get Doonan hired in America, where he would go on to become the creative director of Barneys New York.
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 23
