12th March, 2024 in Biography & Memoir, Society & Culture

Vanity Fair and trailblazing on Savile Row

By Timothy Everest

One day, we got a phone call from Vanity Fair saying the photographer Michael Roberts would like to shoot us on Savile Row. Michael was something of a trailblazer himself. Only a couple of years earlier, he had shot Vivienne Westwood impersonating Margaret Thatcher for the cover of Tatler. The editor got the sack a week later, although it was never confirmed whether the two were connected.

I made some phone calls to Mark Powell, Richard James and Ozwald Boateng, who soon became available when the name Vanity Fair was dangled in front of them.

On the day of the shoot, I drove down to Savile Row on my blue T5 scooter. Scooters were in vogue again, thanks to Britpop, which triggered the renaissance of mod culture. Films like Quadrophenia were being talked about again and the movement had become relevant once more.

We all filed in neatly around the same time. Outside Richard’s shop, his window display was furnished by these beautiful sunflower ties, woven by Vanners, of course. Ozwald clambered atop a red postbox with the Savile Row sign behind him. The shot, which was used as a profile piece entitled ‘London Swings Again’, catches Ozwald looking insouciantly distracted. I also ensured that I was not going to be overlooked in my long lavender woollen overcoat and solid maroon tie with black Wayfarers.

The magazine cover featured Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, shot from a birds-eye view, in a bed adorned with two Union Jack-covered pillows and bedsheets. Patsy looked electric in a see-through black bra, and it made for the perfect snapshot of sex and optimism that was welded to the upspring of Britain’s youth movement at that time.

Northern Irish band D:Ream released the single ‘Things can only get better’ in 1993 and it became an anthem of sorts, the battle cry for the browbeaten working class. It went to number one in ten countries and the Labour Party used it as a theme for their successful election campaign in 1997. There was something in the air and Britain was rejuvenated once more. I thought to myself, as a nation we’re not brilliant at everything, but we do excel in a lot of things, why don’t we celebrate the things that we’re really good at. One of the things we’re very good at in the UK is British tailoring. We just need to take a fresh approach and make it cool again.

At the time, Brits were all too obsessed with making exotic bedfellows with European cultures, particularly Italian. Our cuisine became infused with rocket salads or tricolore pasta, anything with mozzarella, avocado and tomatoes drizzled in balsamic vinegar. Ferraris, not Aston Martins, were a must, if you could afford them. If not a Ferrari, then an Alfa Romeo. The James Bond franchise was tired and even when it came back with Goldeneye, it did so with an Italian tailor, Brioni, not Savile Row. However, it did come back. All of a sudden, with the renaissance of modernism, revamped and reshaped under the guise of Britpop, people were looking less cynically at British culture. It was cool again. Dismantled Britain had regrouped and rediscovered its swagger. The needle had swung so significantly that people were quite proud to be British once more.

Savile Row must have thought it was Christmas with the amount of free publicity that was being generated for them, and it was all being filtered through us, in their little shops in Soho or derelict houses in Spitalfields.

At a client meeting a few weeks later, I bumped into a chap called David Lewis, a cloth merchant at Holland & Sherry.

‘That bloody Ozwald Boateng,’ he grunted.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘His purple suits, his orange ties, those ghastly lime green shirts,’ he paused to collect himself before continuing his unrest. ‘What the hell’s going on, Timothy? They’re not even made properly. They’re ready to-wear! They’re not bespoke.’

David went on, underlining his same misgivings about Ozwald. He kept circling, venting his frustration until he had verbally punched himself out.

‘You know, David,’ I said, ‘the customers that you supply, Henry Poole, Huntsman, Anderson & Sheppard, they’re never going to come to us. But while they’re looking down their nose at Ozwald, they’ll be walking into one of your shops, buying a suit and feeling a sense of affirmation. It’s because of the likes of Ozwald and myself that people are talking about Savile Row again. Love us or hate us, you’ll be the beneficiaries of that.’

Ozwald and I weren’t having meetings every day on ‘how do we become the coolest tailoring houses on the block?’, but we had a point of difference and people have a knack of welding the word ‘cool’ onto something that reinterprets anything commonly viewed as acutely traditional. And at that time, no one was doing any ‘cool’ tailoring. Whether people realise it or give us credit, we’ve made a lot of difference. There are lots of people who’ve got into tailoring off the back of a business called Timothy Everest.

Extracted from Boy Wanted on Savile Row by Timothy Everest