Savile Row, Explained

Where it is, and what it is

Savile Row runs a few hundred metres through Mayfair, parallel to Regent Street. Tailors have worked there since the early nineteenth century, and the trade now spreads into the surrounding streets: Clifford Street, Sackville Street, Cork Street and Old Burlington Street. When people say a tailor is on the Row, they usually mean this quarter rather than the street alone.

The Row is not a brand or a company. It is a cluster of independent houses, some more than two centuries old, some founded in the last twenty years by cutters who trained at the older ones.

What bespoke means here

A pattern is cut from scratch for you, in paper, by a named cutter. Nothing is adjusted from a block. That pattern is kept, so a second suit years later starts from your own shape rather than a fresh measurement.

The garment is basted together and fitted on you at least twice before it is finished, so the cut can be corrected on your body rather than on a chart. Much of the sewing is done by hand by coat and trouser makers, often working in the house's own workrooms.

This is what separates bespoke from made-to-measure, where an existing pattern is adjusted, and from custom or personalised, which can mean almost anything.

The houses do not cut the same suit

Each house has a cut of its own, and choosing between them is mostly about which silhouette suits you. Huntsman is known for a structured, strong-shouldered one-button coat with a pronounced waist. Anderson & Sheppard is known for the opposite: a soft, lightly structured drape cut with room through the chest and a natural shoulder.

Others sit between the two, and several houses founded more recently by Row-trained cutters offer that training without the older houses' overheads. The useful question at a first appointment is not what is fashionable, but what the house's own cut does for your shoulders and posture.

What a first visit involves

You can walk in, though an appointment is better and costs nothing. The first visit is a conversation: what you need the suit for, how you dress, which cloth, and a set of measurements taken with the tape and the eye together.

Expect two or three fittings after that, typically over eight to twelve weeks. The first is on a basted garment held together loosely, which looks alarming and is meant to. Corrections are marked in chalk and cut again.

Nobody will mind if it is your first suit. Houses that have dressed four generations of a family also dress people buying one suit for one wedding.

What it costs, and the alternatives

Row houses generally start between £5,500 and £7,500 for a two-piece. Huntsman publishes £7,500; Steed, working in the same tradition outside the street, lists £5,500 before VAT.

If that is beyond what you want to spend, two routes keep most of the craft: a Row-trained cutter working under their own name off the street, or a house's made-to-measure service, which uses the same cloths and a version of the same fit for roughly a third to half the price.