House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row

by Lance Richardson

  …But now then what is this? Something is falling in the door…we can only guess…it’s electric pink taffeta from mouth to ankle…it’s topped by a 4-foot hat with things hanging off it—also pink…it’s got the most enormous pair of black brogues sticking out of its end…IT MUST BE WALKING CANDY FLOSS????? No. Wrong. It’s Mrs. Shilling (or maybe it’s the missing bishop).

  At this point we have all turned the colour of Mrs. Shilling’s dress—and as shiny—especially me and Cilla who are seriously concerned about the mascara. WE ARE MELTING. But it’s time for the show to begin and a marvellous show it is too. W-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l suits, jackets, woolies, trousers and coats fly past our eyes on spectacular models (quite obviously hand-picked by Tommy’s discerning eyes): 2 lovely girls and the boys are to die [for]…Tommy’s colours are just as glorious: greys/reds; browns/petrol/blues; greens/beige: STUNNING AND NOT EXPENSIVE.

  And now it’s over but not before a reluctant, bashful Tommy takes a curtain call to tumultuous, well-deserved applause. We get a chance to stretch our legs.

  There are two quite separate stampedes taking place: 1) to get to Tommy and 2) to get to the free champagne. We’ve seen Tommy so we opt for the champagne. We are nearly trampled to death by those who are trying to get FROM the champagne to Tommy. We scratch and claw our way through Ossie Clark, Ricci Burns, Lady (looking bubbly) Rothermere, Stewart Grimshaw with yet two more guests: Jan de Villeneuve who looks just the same as she did ten years ago, and a very pretty anorexic lady looking alarmingly like a) Audrey Hepburn and b) [as though] she’s going to drop dead from starvation at any minute, PLUS a whole assortment of long, tall, fat, thin persons who interfere just too much to allow the drunks among us to get to the bottle. Never mind. We go home.

  Marvellous show Tommy.

  WE’LL BE BACK.

  * * *

  Tommy’s eponymous emporium announced itself loudly, with an electric-blue neon sign above the entrance. Five cream awnings were also stenciled with his name, in case there was absolutely any doubt about his triumphant return to Savile Row.

  Through a glass door, up a short staircase trimmed with wrought iron and polished oak, the showroom—all 3,000 square feet of it—was covered with thick beige carpet. The walls and ceilings were joined together by soft curves, so there were very few sharp corners anywhere. Most of the lighting was recessed, flowing down or gushing up from beneath displays like water from a dozen hidden fountains. Persian rugs were juxtaposed with deep-padded sofas, tinted mirrors, copious amounts of chrome. One magazine would liken the décor to “an elegant ocean liner,” though perhaps there was also a touch of the starship Enterprise—a kind of retro-futurism about the place. “I wanted it to exude quality, but not in a stuffy sort of way,” Tommy told one journalist. He told another that it was supposed to be an “up-dated traditional look,” featuring combinations “that wouldn’t normally be put together,” which was, after all, the same approach he took to designing clothes. “I wanted customers to be able to take one look at the shop and know immediately what type of clothes they would find here,” Tommy said.

  Still, it was clear that there was also something a little off about the place. Despite Tommy’s rapturous trumpeting in the press, the showroom design was not really his taste. Like a hermit crab, he’d scurried into an old John Michael store; he’d made small cosmetic changes, adjusted the frontage, added his name in blazing neon, but left the major features mostly unaltered. This extended to the clothing too. “They basically had all the old stock from the shop that had previously occupied 19 Savile Row,” recalls Catherine Everest (then Butterworth), Tommy’s new assistant. “Tommy was very unhappy about it, because it wasn’t representative of his level of style.” As the offending knitwear and shirts were sold off to unsuspecting customers, the stock did not immediately replenish either, until the shelving displays began to look “embarrassingly bare.” Tommy moved bolts of cloth around, “trying to dress the shop up to look fuller than it actually was.”

  Catherine Butterworth had responded to an advertisement in the Evening Standard after recognizing Tommy’s name from back issues of Vogue. She understood where he’d come from, the glory of Nutters, and she understood what he was now hoping to achieve. “Tommy looked at the shop—not like his last chance, but as an opportunity to become as big as he once had been,” Catherine says. Tommy’s new head cutter, James Cottrell, a highly experienced coat maker from Kilgour, French & Stanbury, sensed something similar: “I think he was trying to pick up the pieces from years gone by.”

  Without Alan Lewis as his financier, Tommy would never have returned to Savile Row; he knew this and was eternally grateful for the chance. But he also got slightly more than he bargained for in their agreement. Lewis’s approach to business that had made him so astonishingly successful elsewhere—backing a troubled venture and then “turning it around” by reducing overheads, eliminating fat, pushing productivity—came as a shock to Tommy and his classically trained tailors. Lewis would pull up in a Rolls-Royce and walk into the store wearing a large fur coat. He brought with him what Cottrell describes as “relentless pressure.”

  “How many orders have you taken?” Lewis might ask. “How many are you getting out this week? Are they all going to go home?”

  As Lewis himself remembers it, Tommy’s business immediately began to hemorrhage money, “a hundred thousand in the first two years.” So pressure was necessary to staunch the bleeding. His bullwhip attitude annoyed the workers, though, who were more accustomed to the vagaries of the bespoke trade, to building a clientele over time and then weathering famines and reveling in the feasts when they finally came. How many suits were they finishing up? “It depends if the customer comes in,” says Cottrell. “We just used to look at each other and think, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ ”

  For his part, Tommy remained politely deferential toward Mr. Lewis—or “Alana,” as he sometimes called him, less deferentially, behind his back. Still, shoestring conditions were not what Tommy had envisaged for his big Savile Row comeback, and he greeted the strictures and demands from above, invariably concerning money (always, his whole career, concerning money), with a disillusioned sigh. “He wasn’t really interested in money,” Catherine recalls. “What did interest him was getting it right, the right suit. That was his thing: doing interesting designs.” In this regard, Tommy and Alan Lewis had a fundamental conflict. They would waltz around the situation for years, each one struggling to take the lead.

  Tommy with James Cottrell, his head cutter.

  At least there was the tantalizing promise of future growth. The 1980s were shaping up to be a boom time for menswear. Tommy would later call it “the suits revolution,” explaining that “everyone got back into wearing suits, the big suits, and it was a rebellion of sorts…It became ‘new’ to wear a suit.” Though unemployment was still high in 1983, inflation had fallen dramatically, and the recession was basically over. People began to accrue incredible levels of wealth, a grab that would only go into overdrive with the sudden deregulation of the financial markets in the middle of the decade. With new wealth came a desire to show it off, to flaunt. Aesthetics and materialism became even more entwined with social status, as Patrick Collins would note in The Mail on Sunday:

  The Old Men bought their suits from Burtons, their hats from Dunns and their opinions from the Daily Telegraph. They drove elderly Daimlers, sitting alongside wives who wore long-serving sable and offered you pictures of their grandchildren.

  The New Men are dressed by Mr Tommy Nutter. They wear built-up shoes for confidence and Cartier watches for show. They drive Italian cars with personalised number plates: computers on the dash board and Barry Manilow on the stereo. Their latest wife, who was once a beauty queen and wanted to be happy and own a health farm, sits in the back and pleads for their attention.

  Suiting for the “New Men” was a question of power: the “power suit” signifi
ed success and self-determination. With the widespread adoption of centralized air-conditioning, too, suits could be thinner, lighter, and more comfortable, something you could wear to the office and then out to a nightclub. This shift from formality to versatility in men’s suiting (which is what the so-called suits revolution was really about) was driven by the work of one figure in particular: Giorgio Armani. What Armani did was like “cutting the buckles and taking the stuffing from a straitjacket,” Time noted in a breathless cover profile of the Italian designer in 1982. An Armani suit was “an epiphany of choreographed rumple,” and wearing one brought “an ease, the Armani ease,” that was simultaneously sexy and sharp, formal and casual. Armani had reimagined the suit as a kind of everyday, glamorous uniform. He’d then successfully marketed this vision to the masses via, for example, American Gigolo, in which Richard Gere modeled his clothes, looking louche yet devastatingly handsome.

  Even Tommy had to admit begrudgingly (“I hate to mention it”) that Armani had done something remarkable here. But he saw a natural affinity between their approaches to suits as a kind of lifestyle choice: “Armani came along and was on my same wave length,” Tommy once claimed. He was also determined to embrace the suits revolution in his own way, not through imitating Armani’s successful style. As Aldo Fleri, a salesman at Tommy Nutter, explains, “Armani used feminine fabrication—the suits are very soft, very flowy—whereas Tommy used masculine fabrication. He wouldn’t put a crepe suit together, for example. It just wasn’t him. He would put a Prince of Wales check together, or a chalk stripe: a very masculine type of look.”

  A 1980s Tommy Nutter suit was something you could wear for business, but there was usually an irregular twist to it: emerald-green pinstripes on a navy background, say, or petrol blue in worsted flannel. “I don’t want to make everything too wild,” Tommy explained. “I like a mixture. If you want to wear a classic, Savile Row cut, you can [buy ready-to-wear]. If you don’t, then you can wear one of my bespoke designs.”

  What characterized these bespoke designs was a no-vent jacket, because “a gentleman never wears vents,” and some seriously ambitious padding. Once, a journalist asked Tommy if he got many people coming in and asking for “an Armani suit.” Tommy replied, “Not really. My customers come because they want a suit that looks like a Tommy Nutter.” Then he squeezed both his shoulders to emphasize the point.

  In recent years, Savile Row had come to prefer soft, “ski-slope” shoulders, but with Tommy “it was always a little bit of a battle to get the shoulders higher and wider,” recalls James Cottrell. “It was quite an exaggerated look.”

  “A very masculine type of look.”

  It was also divisive. On the one hand, Tommy’s supporters were both vocal and socially prominent: Sir Roy Strong, director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, bought a gray horizontal chalk-stripe suit for the museum’s fashion collection, arguing that Tommy Nutter’s menswear designs perfectly encapsulated the age. On the other hand, GQ would eventually compare a suit from Tommy Nutter to a Japanese limousine: “very well-made, but a little other-worldly.” And other tailors on Savile Row, including some of Tommy’s former employees, questioned the quality of his finish or muttered that his designs lacked the vigor and elegance he’d once achieved at Nutters with Edward Sexton.

  But Tommy mostly ignored his detractors, making his suits as full and his shoulders as defiantly peaked as he wanted. Indeed, it became a good-natured joke among his staff that Tommy’s own clothes made him formidable, a tank—and that, in modeling his ideal silhouette, which was like a capital letter V, Tommy had to turn sideways just to fit through the door.

  * * *

  Financial constraints meant that Tommy ran his new store with a skeleton crew: a personal assistant, the bookkeeper, two salesmen, five or six tailors under the head cutter, and a rotating roster of outworkers to take care of trousers and waistcoats (coats being crafted on the premises).

  Placing ads in the newspaper, Tommy carried out much of the hiring himself. This process led to some idiosyncratic combinations. One of the first salesmen he employed was David de Lacy Spiddal, a haughty, mustached Irishman who wore a fresh boutonnière in his buttonhole and adored the royal family. Another was Timothy Everest, a club kid with dyed hair who’d once dreamed of becoming a racecar driver.

  Tommy turned out to be remarkably good at keeping spirits high, and he was an excellent mentor to the younger members of his team. He was generous with his time, Timothy Everest recalls, inviting opinions and input and experimentation. “Not a lot of leaders do that,” adds Aldo Fleri, who would arrange cloth samples on a table in the order and quantity he thought they should be ordered, then watch as Tommy came through and gently made corrections, dispensing advice like, “A good contrast is better than a bad match.”

  Almost immediately, Tommy opened his doors to students from the fashion colleges. John Galliano, studying at Saint Martin’s School of Art, briefly appeared in 1983. He would come in to revamp the window displays with sack mannequins and straw boaters or observe the tailors as they conducted a fitting. Years later, Galliano would recall noticing that the sleeves of Tommy’s jackets, lined up in rows on the display racks, “all hung in a gentle arc rather than straight down.” This inspired him to experiment with cutting sleeves in a spiral, which further inspired him to cut entire garments in a spiral, which eventually became one of his signature techniques.

  Also in 1983, Tommy welcomed a twenty-two-year-old intern named Sean Chiles. Another student from Saint Martin’s, Sean came on as a kind of design assistant—“not,” he affirms, “as a tailoring assistant.” The distinction was important.

  With his background in fashion design as a point of comparison, Sean observed that Tommy had an unusual way of working. “As a fashion designer like me, you arrive at your final designs through a process,” Sean explains. “You have inspiration or an idea; you research and take it through experimentation and trial; you end up with your formalized concepts; and then you create it. Tommy didn’t have any process like that. There were no mood boards or anything. It was about how he felt, what he knew, innovations within tailoring.” But Sean also sensed that Tommy was “a designer inside,” and Tommy seemed particularly amenable to design suggestions, filling in gaps in his own knowledge. Once, Sean took a sample of pinstripe cloth and placed a black bugle bead on every gray stripe to “introduce texture and shimmer to the outfit.” Tommy loved it: a Savile Row suit overlaid, quite literally, with fashion. He immediately sold a full suit of the bedazzled cloth to Elton John that would feature, by the time it was completed, 1,009,444 black bugle beads painstakingly attached by hand. “You sat down and body parts started rubbing—eventually the beads would either break or come off,” recalls James Cottrell, who was less enamored with this particular example of men’s couture.

  Above all, what Sean appreciated about Tommy was his fondness for subversion: “Finding ways of conning people into thinking that they were part of the establishment, or that one of his suits was part of the establishment, and yet he twisted it, or changed it, and it wasn’t.”

  This mischievousness could manifest in surprising ways. For instance, Sean’s mother is Ann Mitchell, a stage and television actress then known for starring in Widows, an ITV drama about bereaved mob wives who pull off an armed robbery and then escape to Rio. Tommy was obsessed with the show, and he asked Sean if a meeting could be arranged with his mother. Sean complied. “We had dinner a few times and became friends,” Ann recalls. “And then, for whatever reason, the Evening Standard picked up that we were an item.”

  The reason was this: Tommy had invited Ann to be his date to Elton John’s thirty-sixth birthday party at a Chinese restaurant in Knightsbridge (the same party, incidentally, where Elton debuted his bugle-bead suit). Afterward, Tommy circulated a press release stating that he and the actress had been “seen” there together. When a gossip columnist from the Evening Standard called and a
sked him to elaborate on what he meant by “seen,” Tommy issued a further statement: “You never know about romance. These things happen.”

  The newspaper printed it under the headline “Tailor-Made for One Another.”

  This was all very deliberate on Tommy’s part. And Sean’s, too, because he was in on the gag: “We did it together, created this idea that Tommy and my mum were an item.” Tommy had decided to manipulate the press, “to subvert what was out there,” Sean recalls, and he relished the idea that somebody might be gullible enough to pick up such a ludicrous story and make it public. Once a journalist did exactly that, Ann herself became another willing accomplice. “I loved Tommy,” she says. “And I was subversive too. If he wanted to do it, it was fine by me.”

  * * *

  One of the things that attracted Tommy to Ann Mitchell was the specific character she played on Widows: a resilient, working-class, innately tasteful woman named Dolly Rawlins, who reminded him in certain ways of his own mother.

  But whatever happened to Dolly Nutter?

  Her extended absence from this narrative is not an oversight. Dolly had been absent—or sidelined, more accurately—from the lives of her two sons for a little over two decades by the early 1980s. She still saw them, of course, Tommy for dinners, David whenever he returned to London to do something for Elton. But they visited her like somebody might visit a family member in prison: regretfully, and a little stiffly, just to check she was soldiering on in an unfortunate situation. Christopher’s sour tyranny had never really abated. In letters to David, Tommy had variously described the atmosphere of their parents’ house as “HEAVY!!!” and “very Pink Flamingos.” Neither brother could stand to stay for long; visiting hours to see Dolly were inevitably short.