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CUSTOM FITTING
Bespoke isn't just about tailoring anymore. From perfumes to television, "mass market" is giving way to individuality.

Text: MIREILLE SILCOTT

I was looking for a luxury dress shirt something for nattier occasions. As usual, the magazines were consulted, and then it was off to the shops. The shirt thread unravelled in many different cities, and everywhere, I found the same shirts. Peasant shirts at Prada in three different cities.

Peasant shirts at Yves Saint Laurent in four. Down-market - at departments stores and the like - a veritable peasant coup seemed underway, with knockoffs of the Pradas and the YSLs everywhere I looked. Shopping, my guilty pleasure, but also my great escape, had become an inescapable vortex of obnoxious sameness. In a Gucci store in London, I looked around and realized that the shelves, the staff, the music playing from the speakers, even the shoppers were the same as they were in Toronto. Everyone in Peasant Shirts.

I went home. I visited an old Italian shirtmaker named Denis and got the thing made exactly how I wanted it – a superfine cotton, a bold stripe pattern, French cuffs, white spread collar, high armholes, very narrow cut and absolutely no peasantry. The cost was extravagant. But I love that shirt. And one coat, one pair of trousers and six brightly coloured hankies later, I am now addicted to "getting it custom." I’m not the only one either.

On 57th Street in New York City, near the baroque-cheese decor of the Victoria’s Secret flagship store, is nestled a shop of wood panelling, discreet fitting rooms and fine cotton fabrics stacked floor to ceiling. The New York headquarters of London’s Turnbull & Asser custom shirtmakers since 1885 to everyone from Sir Winston Churchill to three different James Bonds – is exactly how you would expect it. Even its staff are brought over from the Old World to make Britain’s most storied bespoke shirtmaker seem that much more authentic to its New World clients.

Turnbull & Asser – where bespoke shirts are only sold by the half dozen for anywhere from $2,400 to $4,000 – opened in New York at the strangest possible time, in 1998. That’s when Britain’s once thriving bespoke industry – centred on London’s Jermyn Street and Savile Row – seemed headed for an irreversible recession. Blame was laid at the doorsteps of the Guccis, the Pradas, the Armanis – all those new flagship stores with their logoriffic billboards and marketing campaigns. Orders in the basements of the old bespoke stalwarts, like suitmakers Gieves & Hawkes on Savile Row, were thinning. Craftsmen – whose fathers had taught them how to stuff a coat’s breastplate with horsehair – were becoming increasingly hard to find too. For Turnbull, the New York store was something of a last resort. Maybe American clients would appreciate a kind of old school Brit-schtick. Maybe it could drum up some of the business stolen by the global image-mongering of the unstoppable fashion conglomerates like LVMH (Moët Hennessy/Louis Vuitton) and the Gucci Group, who together own what seems like the majority of the big luxury fashion brands.

Just over a year ago, New York’s smart set were still decking themselves in enough logos to put even the heady 1980s to shame. Turnbull – logo-less and with scant advertising – did not seem to stand a chance. Then something terrible happened: buildings came crashing down. And then something else happened: Gucci started emptying out. But people still needed clothes, and they started turning to the likes of Turnbull & Asser. Today, Gucci is showing staggering losses, while the New York tills at Turnbull’s are ringing up orders like never before.

"And it’s not because of any mystique," says Paul Collins, Turnbull’s anchorman-haired U.S. business manager, an import from Britain. Collins thinks it was more a question of "people making real things in a world that suddenly seemed very unreal. It was as if suddenly people looked at themselves and thought, ‘Oh yes, we all look the same, don’t we? Now how did that happen? And who is making this stuff I am buying? A faraway factory? Some adman?’"

Bespoke tailoring is in no way taking over the vast cosmos of the Western clothing industry. But as a symbol, the mini-boom in custom-made clothing is a fine indicator of an undeniable trend, one which, in the land of luxury, is beginning to make itself felt across the board. (And to think that the French fashion press claimed "couture is dead" only five years ago.)

In the opulent hotbed of the cosmetics industry, new companies like Paris’ by Terry offer unctions and unguents tailor-made to the needs of clients. In the fine perfume sector, several well-known noses, like Francis Kurkdjian, the creator of some of Lancôme’s and Armani’s most commercial scents, have branched out into custom services as well. (Want a signature scent? Yours, for a base price of $12,680.) Bespoke shoes, like those made by the venerable John Lobb, have experienced a sizable spike in sales. And in New York’s art world, critics have gone gaga for Toland Grinnell, a leather-artisan-turned-museum-darling, who creates vast pieces of impractical, fanciful custom luggage in the style of old school Louis Vuitton. Even Butterfield & Robinson – purveyors of fancy bicycle group trips for the rich and famous – have just revealed a new premium category bearing the word "bespoke." Clearly, the custom trend is no mere fleeting fad, especially now that it has begun trickling out and trickling down.

Last year, Surgical appliance unveiled a service where you can choose your own colour combinations and have your name stitched on sneakers. Gap showed jeans that were individually stained, bleached and torn, while Levi’s introduced an in-store service in London and San Francisco, where on-site tailors whip up customized denim garments for clients who have the funds – $300 dollars or more – to eschew the plain old off-the-rack stuff. At HMV and Tower Records, the download generation can now make custom compilation CDs on site. And TV satellite packages are giving way to more custom-friendly devices like TiVo, where viewers can create their own personal networks, taking programming from any channel and tacking it together, with all commercial interruptions removed.

Walking down London’s Savile Row – feeling groovy in my striped shirt – I wonder if maybe this still burgeoning taste for the made-to-measure is a reaction to the 1990s, when ads repeatedly told us to "be yourself" by buying the same crap as everyone else. In a few decades’ time, the ’90s will probably be remembered for an aesthetic of homogeneity brought on by multinationalism. Might our present decade be remembered as a backlash decade, where individual style – or individuality – wakes up from a long slumber? It’s not surprising that this new-found appreciation for the handcrafted should be happening now – in a world that feels more inhospitable and out of control than it has in a long time.

After passing by a peculiar shop named oki-ni, where everything from Incontinence pants sneakers to Japanese streetwear is customized, I broach the topic with Robert Gieve, 64, the great-great-great grandson of the original Gieve behind bespoke suit makers Gieves & Hawkes. I am drawn to the shop, one of the Row’s more famous, with the appropriate address of 1, by personal memory. My father used to get Gieves & Hawkes suits before he started buying off the peg a few years ago. "But it is people like your father who are now coming back," says Gieve, a real piece of ruddy-faced toffy sloaniness in huge spectacles and the best-cut pinstripe suit I have ever seen.

Gieve, who as a boy apprenticed to be a tailor, walks me through the showroom, which once belonged to the Royal Geographical Society. He shows me the three levels of suitmaking the company, established in 1785, now offers: traditional bespoke, where a client meets for several fittings with the cutter – the maestro of the trade – and a standard two-piecer costs $6,150 and up; the more American "personal tailoring" option, where for $1,700, clients meet only with a fitter, and suits are whipped up from stock patterns and altered to size; and the "personalized" ready-to-wear clothing, which feature details like hand stitching and, lately, jeans with holes already worn into them. "And every hole is different!" says Gieve, whose father would have plotzed at the very sight of holey workwear on holy Savile Row. This diffusion line, says Gieve, is for the new, younger clients, who are lured in when they hear that Savile Row tailors like Gieves now cater to Tom Cruise, Jude Law and George Clooney.

Gieve then takes me downstairs to the workrooms, where time, seemingly, has stood still. The basement is low-ceilinged, somewhat airless and as Dickensian as might be legal. Pressers actually press thread under clouds of steam. Coatmakers and trousermakers work shears to the clip-clop of shoes rushing by their heads from the sidewalk-level window. Buttonholers and finishers sit hunched over minutiae. And everywhere, bundles of cut fabric, zippers and waistbands are rolled up, wrapped like sushi in a worksheet on which measurements are noted, along with other important pieces of information ("drop shoulder, recently divorced, likes cigars").

For Gieves & Hawkes, like Turnbull & Asser, the economic downturn has brought with it an upswing in business. Robert Gieve wonders if it’s "this new formality" all the men’s magazines "have been going on about" since 9-11. I tell him maybe it’s the "new intimacy." People are wanting things a little more "me" and a little less "Taiwan." He likes that. "Or the new personalism?" he offers. I ask if that’s a word. "Oh yes," he beams. "A custom-made one.

"After leaving Gieves & Hawkes, I make a stop at Gucci to see if anything has changed since the last time I had visited, in my shirt-quest days. The carpets are the same. So is the merch. I ask a young clerk with a mullet in the men’s department how business is going. He shrugs – "been better" – but is happy to tell me about the new service Gucci is offering its male clients: a bespoke suitmaking service. "We think," murmurs the clerk, "that might do something to get some of our more discerning clients back through the doors."