House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row

by Lance Richardson

  Tommy noted these adjustments at Nutters from a safe viewing distance. He was careful not to get too close, lest he stumble into an accidental encounter. If he spotted Edward walking toward him down the street, he crossed to the other side.

  At KFS, to keep himself happy at the small desk where he was expected to spend most of his time, Tommy indulged in design follies. There was his poppy-red bespoke “jogging suit” that was “also suitable for discotheques” (£402). And a pair of pajamas with a black bow tie and wing collar, adorned with £21,000 worth of antique jewel-encrusted crosses.

  In another ensemble, Tommy paired white leather breeches with a slub silk jacket, evoking, as he told Men’s Wear, “a cross between Cecil B. DeMille and a jockey at a cocktail party.”

  During warmer months, he took much-needed breaks to Saint-Tropez with Stewart Grimshaw, Simon Sainsbury, and his new friend Amanda Lear. He also frequented the Embassy Club, London’s answer to Studio 54, where Michael Fish now worked as a greeter. Tommy remained a committed devotee of gay nightlife—dinners at La Popote, a “leather and chains” party, an Australian drag revue in Wimbledon. He dated a witty, blond twenty-seven-year-old solicitor (“very me!,” he wrote to his brother) and then a six-foot, blond professional swimmer from the East End (“very me—won’t last dear, but it’s nice at the moment”).

  The white leather breeches were left in the basement at KFS “by a duke who changed his mind at the last moment.”

  Throughout it all, one dependable pleasure remained a series of galas thrown by the Scottish luxury textile mill Reid & Taylor. The company’s managing director, a flamboyant autocrat named John Packer, would convene a gathering of international buyers and designers at some iconic location around Europe—the Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, say, or Schleissheim Palace in Munich. Guests would be flown in on a private Boeing 707, showered with Moët & Chandon, and beguiled by opera singers or the London Lassus Ensemble. Then there would be a catwalk show staged as a procession of dramatic scenes: blushing brides, followed by a hunting party pretending to shoot game birds above the head of Princess Margaret (the honored guest). John Packer attended to every detail with the morbid fastidiousness of Stanley Kubrick. Of course, these gatherings, which could cost more than £100,000 (some $700,000 in today’s currency) to stage, were little more than elaborate PR exercises intended to increase sales for Reid & Taylor and the designers who used the company’s products. But Tommy valued the events for an entirely different reason. Once, after a gala in Munich, he would write a thank-you note to Packer laying out his thoughts:

  I think the nicest part about the whole jamboree was being transported from the humdrum saga of everyday life into a kind of dream world where reality became twinkling lights, glamorous people, exquisite cuisine, and, to cap it all, the heavenly strains of the most beautiful voices in the world…

  In these days, when most things seem to be a problem, thank god there is someone who can LIFT us out of the gloom to recharge our batteries so we can battle on in this extremely competitive world we all live in.

  * * *

  Perhaps “gloom” was the most appropriate word to describe the dawn of the new decade. The Winter of Discontent had descended at the end of 1978, and since then Britain had experienced one convulsive shock after another. That dreadful season, one of the worst cold snaps since the Second World War, had coincided with a perfect storm of union strikes and go-slows, involving everyone from bakery workers to provincial journalists. Trains shut down because national railway staff refused to budge on four separate days; trash piled up because garbagemen refused to clear it (including from Leicester Square); and, perhaps most famously, gravediggers declined to bury the dead in Liverpool until their demands were met. Some hospitals were reduced to taking emergency patients only, because fresh medical supplies could not get past the picket lines. When Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, having just arrived home from a summit in the Caribbean, was asked by a reporter about this “mounting chaos,” Callaghan replied: “I don’t think other people in the world will share the view that there is mounting chaos.” This response was quickly paraphrased in popular imagination as the out-of-touch “Crisis? What Crisis?,” sealing Callaghan’s fate. In 1979, his minority Labour government lost the general election, restoring the Conservatives to power and elevating Margaret Thatcher to the post of prime minister. Her economic policy reforms sent the unemployment rate soaring as the nation was exposed to the full shock treatment of Thatcherism.

  At least publicly, Tommy professed to be unconcerned by the prospect of recession. In 1980, speaking on BBC Radio Brighton, he affirmed that no matter how bad things might get, people “will still eat good food, buy nice cars. And they will buy nice clothes.” It was a commonly held assumption, one journalist wrote, that monetary stress encouraged men to retreat to more traditional modes of dress, that when times are hard “there is nothing like a sober suit, conservative shirt, old school tie and short back and sides to persuade the bank manager that you are doing well.” But Tommy brushed this idea off like lint. Before a large audience of manufacturers in Cologne, he insisted that the opposite was true: the bowler hat, pinstripe suit, and rolled umbrella—the British businessman’s uniform—was “officially dead” as a result of the worsening economic climate. It was a moment of opportunity for men’s fashion, Tommy argued.

  This unwavering optimism reflected Tommy’s personality: he always leaned toward the sun. Yet it also showed just how emboldened he’d grown in the light of his recent achievements. The Cue Shop arrangement was still going strong a year after his inaugural collection. Following the lead of Calvin Klein in New York, he’d just introduced “classic, respectable Savile Row jeans”—terracotta-colored seams, with a signature “N” stitched on the back pocket. And there was also, finally, an international franchise deal on the table: a five-year design contract with Daido Worsted Mills, the Japanese consortium, and an agreement to create two collections a year for Osaka’s Hankyu Department Store. “Is there an end to the success of Tommy Nutter at Kilgour, French and Stanbury?” asked one of the trade papers in August 1980. As far as anybody could reasonably tell, the answer appeared to be “no.” Which is perhaps why Lincroft Kilgour now agreed to a terrifically risky proposition.

  A draft of this idea can be found on a notepad among Tommy’s papers, in his own unmistakable handwriting.

  Get rid of Are You Being Served? image in Savile Room and transform into SEPARATE boutique i.e. Elizabeth Arden…Open up shop window as much as possible to encourage passing trade, although at the moment this is negligible. Eliminate as much office work and incoming telephone calls whenever possible. No typing in this area…Umbrella stands to go…Take out circular pouffe and re-design shop to incorporate two settees…

  Have separate logo etc.

  That is, have a separate logo for the Tommy Nutter ready-to-wear boutique that would devour a sizable chunk of the Dover Street store and offer limited-edition items in houndstooth tweeds, corduroy, bouclé, flannel, and velvet cord.

  To his credit, Tommy (referring to himself in the third person) did make a note about the dangers of going through with this plan.

  T. N. admitted not to have sufficient knowledge of running and stocking such a shop. Nutters Shirts opened and folded. If such a shop is to open an expert should be hired for…setting up.

  T. N. would promote.

  But he thought it was a worthwhile gambit anyway.

  We need to get younger people in shop—Disco, Pop, Film people who have no time for fittings etc. At the moment NONE of those come in except the few who like bespoke clothes.

  At the moment, NONE of the people Tommy saw as his people were coming in, and he was proposing a plan to rectify this. The Lincroft Kilgour directors apparently found his pitch thoroughly convincing, too, because they soon approved it. Tommy got his wish for a “shop-within-a-shop”—the second major re
novation of the Dover Street store he’d instigated in the past four years. Called “Tommy Nutter for Kilgours,” the boutique was launched in February 1981 with a reception at the Ritz, attended by none other than Cilla Black, who delayed an international flight to show up and support her friend. (Having recently given birth to her third son, Cilla moaned about her weight to a tabloid journalist while digging into “second helpings of lamb and potatoes.”)

  With typical hyperbole, Tommy immediately announced that Savile Row tailoring would never be quite the same again. His ready-to-wear line, one of the very first for a serious bespoke tailor, was positioned on a retail ladder below bespoke but above something like Austin Reed: pricey, but not eye-wateringly so. It was also branded with Tommy’s subversive sense of humor. Many of the items—check jackets, elephant-cord trousers, Schiaparelli-pink silk ties—could be jumbled together and redeployed in multiple contexts, so Tommy named it his “millionaire-on-the-dole” collection. As if to underscore the brazen jab at class snootiness in this title, he also affixed everything with an emerald-green tassel. Even press releases received this faux-aristocratic appendage, which made them look like regal decrees about sales trends in men’s knitwear.

  Finally, Tommy unveiled a print advertising campaign that gently mocked any KFS client who turned up his nose at the idea of ready-to-wear—and mocked, judging by the salesman’s grim expression in the ad, any haughty staff member at Dover Street who might have resented having to sell it. The collection was simultaneously serious and ironic, Savile Row and “Savile Row,” elegant and winkingly self-aware as a performance of high-class elegance. In other words, camp.

  “Tommy Nutter for Kilgours”

  * * *

  There is no doubt that Tommy could sometimes get a little carried away. For years, his more experimental designs had raised eyebrows in certain quarters; for every handful of admirers, he had at least one critic questioning his taste and intentions. But sometime around 1981, it became increasingly difficult to draw a steady line between his serious work and those lighthearted design follies. It was as though Tommy’s self-indulgent tendencies went into overdrive. He became a parody of himself. He proposed, for example, a line of “Rugged Couture” with serrated hemlines, which he conceived after catching a rerun of Jaws on television.

  “Rugged Couture”

  Then there was the Big Sweep for Men, as Tommy called it: “Large cashmere blankets with fringing will be thrown with aplomb and gay abandon over the shoulder and SLASHED in at the waist with strong leather belts.” Modeling this dubious look for the Evening Standard, he freely confessed to “feeling a little absurd” as he posed on the street outside KFS. Yet the outfit was treated sincerely by the columnist Liz Smith, who thought it made “several strong fashion points,” and then embraced by a pair of earnest reporters over in New York: “Meticulously draped or artlessly flung about the shoulders, The Sweep is being worn by this city’s most intrepid males—a phalanx of stylish d’Artagnans…”

  In April 1982, Tommy would even take a major international crisis and turn it into fodder for his sketchpad. As Thatcher was furiously dispatching her Royal Navy task force to snatch back the Falkland Islands from Argentina, Tommy alerted the media to his own aggressive “Nautical Look,” insisting that “marine blue will be the new colour, with an armada of peaked caps angled jauntily. Not since the ‘Khyber Pass’ look has there been such an invasion on the male fashion scene.”

  Years later, Tommy would admit that much of this stuff was just him “having a bit of fun. In business you’ve got to lighten it a bit, whatever you do, so I used to write funny little press releases about whatever was current, and the press would pick up on it.” Be that as it may, Tommy’s idea of fun required resources and time; time meant money; and money was running alarmingly low at Lincroft Kilgour in the early 1980s. Just five months after opening Tommy’s “shop-within-a-shop,” the conglomerate directors released a statement about preliminary talks that “may lead to the sale of a substantial part of the group.” Lincroft Kilgour’s losses from the previous year had surpassed £425,000, and Tommy’s efforts at KFS were hardly helping to turn the family’s fortunes around.

  “The Nautical Look”

  Indeed, even Tommy could recognize that relations between him and the group had started to sour. He confided in a letter to David that he didn’t think the second makeover of Dover Street had worked on any level: the showroom was still “boring and old-fashioned,” and now, with the deepening recession taking its heavy toll, there was a suffocating atmosphere of “gloom” about the place (that word again). Really, the only thing that seemed to be going even remotely well was the Cue Shop collaboration. And Japan, which was “enormous,” Tommy wrote. “They even have posters of the ‘old girl’ all over the tube stations.”

  トミー・ナター

  * * *

  In June 1982, Tommy flew to Japan to see for himself. His primary goal, he announced in a press bulletin that cast the voyage of “Mick Jagger’s tailor” as a monumentally important event, was to “get all those Japanese businessmen out of their boring navy blue suits.” His luggage was crammed with schedules, to-do lists, letters of introduction, half-written speeches, and costume changes. On the flight over, he nursed a fractured arm; a speeding motorbike had knocked him down the week before. This was an irrelevant detail he also offered to journalists, in case they wanted to write about his health.

  The itinerary was dizzying: ten days of presentations and runway shows, train trips and planning sessions, and long, formal meetings. As Tommy glanced over an outline of the trip forwarded to him by the team in Japan, he added his own annotations: “Mr Hori—whiskey,” “Mr Iijima—cigarettes,” “VIP,” “DEPART EXHAUSTED.”

  Landing at Narita International Airport, he was immediately rushed away to a business dinner. The next morning, he was at the Foreign Press Center for a rehearsal and two “fashion spectaculars.” European models had been brought in for the shows because Tommy’s angle (at his Japanese hosts’ request) was that he was giving “part of Britain’s great heritage to Japan, where I know it will be appreciated.” This exoticized Britishness—a refreshing reversal from the usual Orientalism—was played up to an almost ludicrous extent, through stage projections of London icons (Big Ben and red phone booths) and gold-leaf stamps on all the press releases, which were written out in meticulous calligraphy.

  Over in Osaka, Tommy attended a gala reception in his honor at the Hankyu Department Store. Then he delivered a lecture to 150 tailors, and posed for pictures with every single one of them. He traveled by train to Kyoto for a day of tourism, photographing a Buddhist temple, Japanese schoolgirls, more Japanese schoolgirls, and himself in a bathroom mirror. Amid all this, he was showered with gifts—a Minolta camera, bouquets of flowers—and treated like a visiting dignitary. This was deeply gratifying to Tommy, who had only recently complained that he’d “never been a megastar in England. Always famous, but never a real megastar.” Now here he was, standing in a spotlight, basking in rapturous applause.

  A gala reception at Hankyu Department Store, Osaka.

  When Tommy returned to London on June 9 from this delirious vanity tour, he found himself unemployed. If that sounds abrupt—well, it was. And also not.

  “He fell out with Kilgour because he thought it wasn’t good for him, it was too restrictive, they wanted to control him,” remembers Alan Lewis. The partnership had always been a marriage of convenience, and now it was time to divorce. Lincroft Kilgour no longer wanted to bankroll Tommy, an expensive wildcard at a moment when every expense was being scrupulously appraised; and Tommy no longer wanted to work within the strictures of KFS, which was (he said) tying him down. Still, inevitable though it may have been, the parting seems to have caught him unprepared in the middle of 1982. “He had no money at all when he came to see me,” Lewis recalls.

  A bold entrepr
eneur from Manchester, Alan Lewis had made his money through property and finance in the wool textiles industry. Forty-four years old, he was a staunch Conservative, a fervent believer in Christian healing, and extraordinarily self-disciplined: “Karate in the morning, weightlifting in the evening and no smoking, alcohol, or meat-eating in between,” as a journalist once put it. He could be ruthless when it came to business, buying and merging or breaking up companies, prioritizing efficiency and results over all other concerns (including the workers). But he also liked to be seen on the social circuit, to have a good time, splash a bit of money about. And he knew how to dress, often in Tommy Nutter suits. So perhaps it was not so surprising that Tommy should suddenly gravitate toward him as a potential deus ex machina, despite being his polar opposite in nearly every way.

  As Lewis remembers it: “Tommy said, ‘I’m broke. I need some help. I think you’re an honest man. Will you help me?’ ”