When Pitti Uomo, arguably the world’s leading trade show for menswear, was held in Florence this January, there was an unusual name in attendance: Davies & Son. Established in 1803, the choice of Clark Gable and Bryan Ferry, Davies & Son is one of the most respected, if less well-known, of the bespoke tailors on Savile Row, the sartorial Mecca that, for centuries, has consciously set itself apart from the world of fashion.
Indeed, Davies & Son proves to be the first Savile Row tailor to have shown at Pitti Uomo. Why so? Because it has teamed up with the LVMH Prize-winning Japanese fashion designer behind Setchu, Satoshi Kuwata, on a collaborative collection. It is perhaps hard, suggests Johnny Allen, head of bespoke tailoring at Davies & Son, to grasp quite what a departure this represents for Savile Row.
“Fashion people still tend to think of Savile Row as funny old men in striped suits and bowler hats, as a slightly dusty institution. And certainly Savile Row—the older companies especially—has been scared of collaborating [with the fashion world]. It just wasn’t interested. The Old Guard would invariably say no,” says Allen, who has tailored personal orders for the likes of Marc Jacobs and A Bathing Ape’s Tomoaki Nagao. “The fact is that everyone in fashion seems to be working in collaboration now. Savile Row can no longer be the exception and the last few years has seen a change of attitude”.
Savile Row has collaborated before but, as Allen notes, it’s tended to be safe territory: making pinstripe upholstery fora British luxury carmaker, for example, and reaping the fleeting PR bounce accordingly. Now, he argues, there’s a more progressive stance towards collaborations that both surprise (yes, publicity still matters) but also challenge both sides of the deal to push their design skills.
“I’ve certainly learnt how refreshing it is to try something different, rather than sticking to the tried and tested grey, navy or striped suits,”he says. “[The Kuwata collaboration] has made for something very different to the kind of formal wear garment you’d find on Savile Row”.
Different it certainly is: Kuwata, who trained in tailoring under Allen 20 years ago, has pushed Davies to apply his distinctive, origami approach of ironing and cutting folds into the patterns to allow the resulting jackets to fold flat, akin to a kimono. “It has brought a more twisted element to Savile Row,” Kuwata says.
He argues that he was able to pursue this more complex approach because his background afforded him insight as to how far he could push the Savile Row ethos without his ideas being rejected. “I understand the rules of Savile Row—that there are certain aspects [of its approach] that you can’t touch and ones that you can,” he laughs.
“But the fact is that Savile Row generally doesn’t like working with designers because all too often they tend not to understand what Savile Row does—and how [it’s a guardian] of hundreds of years of knowledge. I find the same when I work with traditional shirtmaker in Naples—the sense is that, really, they don’t want to know. When I started my own label I spoke [with Davies& Son] about doing something together but didn’t really believe it would happen because, you know, who does a proper collaboration with Savile Row?”
Of course, behind the scenes Savile Row has often worked with designers, but essentially as workshops with unique skills that designers have needed to tap. Anderson & Sheppard, for example, has worked more for, than with, Wales Bonner—and the designer is relying on the house for its technical input for its Winter 2025 collection too. When H Huntsman & Sons collaborated with designer Demna Gvasalia’s debut couture show for Balenciaga three years ago, the tailor struggled to get due recognition.
There was, as Huntsman’s managing director Taj Phull puts it, “a lot of toing and froing with Balenciaga to get our name attached to it. It became clear it was never going to be a Huntsman x Balenciaga project”. But increasingly Savile Row is shifting towards just this kind of shared billing—an acknowledgement that its recognition is well-deserved. As Toby Lamb, brand director of Richard James, has it, “just supplying a fashion designer with your expertise is in a way like doing so for any customer. It’s a service. But Savile Row has this incredible credibility. It’s a global name. I’m not sure why any [partner] wouldn’t want to highlight that connection”.
Anderson & Sheppard, again, has worked with Giles Deacon on a co-branded bag project. In 2023 Campbell Carey, head cutter at Huntsman, created nine garments with designer Daniel Fletcher—making for an intriguing marriage of the tailor’s prowess with Fletcher’s play with bolder silhouettes and outsize proportions, with the designer paying homage by leaving bespoke’s basting stitches visible on the outside of his jackets. Richard James—which has not been shy of “unexpected collaborations that are a little left-field”, as Lamb refers to the brand’s past tie-in with SpongeBob SquarePants—is now working with new generation designer Luke Derrick on a capsule collection based around a camo-print double-breasted smoking jacket, launching in March.
Nor are these collaborations restricted to a meeting of minds with ‘designer’ names; other recent collaborations have offered the opportunity to explore more technical garments of a kind typically not within Savile Row’s remit. Richard James has teamed up with high-tech sportswear company Castore, for example.
Henry Poole & Co—the oldest tailor of Savile Row—may in the past have pursued more predictable collaborations with brands operating in the same luxury sphere, the likes of Jaguar-Land Rover, and with Rolls-Royce on the launch of the new Phantom. But it has also collaborated with the likes of Adidas—on a pair of “evening sneakers”—Canada Goose and, most recently, Gore-Tex.
Such collaborations “raise eyebrows to start with,” admits Henry Poole’s managing director Simon Cundey, “but they give you a certain dynamism. They need to be fun. They should be about bringing some spice to each other’s table”. That, at least, is if the right attitude is in place.
“Savile Row tailors are stubborn people, to put it politely—and in another context I’d use a more colourful word,” laughs Phull, “so to have a designer who wants to do something different you also need the right cutter in place, someone who won’t fight attempts to bend the rules. But it’s in doing just that that means we get to push boundaries and showcase our craft”.
Indeed, the motivation for Savile Row to increasingly look beyond its historic and largely traditional confines—and, in a sense, to return to the historic ethos of innovative design that it embodied before the advent of ready-to-wear—is more than the marketing opportunity it affords. Most preferred projects make commercial sense, but often, from Savile Row’s perspective, the priority is precisely what one might not expect it to be: to be challenged.
Phull, whose dream isto collaborate with Yohji Yamamoto, argues that while “the mindset of much of Savile Row is just to stay in one’s lane and focus on the best tailoring, within that is a craft that, the Row is learning, can be applied to other things and in other ways. And doing so puts Savile Row at the forefront again”.
That is maybe all the more important at a time when generating new customers is becoming increasingly hard. While Kuwata argues that it’s essential that “the World Heritage-like culture and character of Savile Row is protected”—which is why he would advise its tailors to pick collaborators more carefully than a fashion brand might do—it’s also facing a market in which, he laments, “more and more younger people don’t even know what Savile Row is.
“The culture now is for the ready-made, for cheaper, almost throwaway clothing, and away from suits,” he adds. “[Collaborations] can help not just to give Savile Row the attention it seems to get less and less of these days, but in engaging just enough of those younger people to appreciate what Savile Row is, aspire to owning a bespoke suit and so giving Savile Row [as an institution] a future”.
What’s in it for the non-Savile Row side? It was Joerg Haas, co-founder of Berlin-based creative agency Being Hunted, who drove Henry Poole’s collaboration with W. L. Gore, the Italian textile manufacturer behind Gore-Tex; he was inspired by the work of his consultant friend Patrick Reinhard—former global senior product manager for Adidas and the man who had previously connected Poole with the sportswear giant.
“My general recommendation and take is always to do something that’s not obvious,” Haas argues. “Whether it’s a brand whose customers are completely unfamiliar with the other partner, or if there are different technologies or production techniques, that’s where the challenge starts. And the result should be something that neither partner could have achieved by themselves”.
The result in this instance—an archive-inspired tailored trenchcoat, with a peacoat to follow, in Gore’s technical fabric—has allowed Gore to both work with made-to-order garments and come to be associated with a more formal style for the first time, “and that’s allowed us to generate relevance with a new kind of audience for us, one more about elegance than the fashion of brands like, say, Stone Island or Moncler,” explains Valentina Savi, W. L. Gore’s head of global lifestyle marketing.
“It wasn’t so much about generating revenue, but of getting our brand known to the kind of [Savile Row] customer who is used to very high quality—and who has money to spend”. Likewise, for Castore the decision to work with Richard James was decided when the two companies—on the surface so different—found a common purpose.
“In this case it was a shared regard for precision,” explains Castore’s head of design Anna Graham. “That’s what made it feel right, although it was certainly a big challenge on both sides, both in tailoring with a technical performance characteristic [with internal seams bonded rather than sewn, for example], and for us working with tailoring when we’re more used to shorts and T-shirts. But I think the experience has helped our design team to re-frame the way it thinks in positive new ways”.
But is Savile Row just too late to the party? It doesn’t escape its management that, in the fashion world at least, "brand x brand" collaborations now verge on cliché. Increasingly, argues Haas, collaborations are big productions between big brands, with the incentive to work with the untapped creative potential of more minor names diminishing. Collaborations have become less an open exchange of ideas and more a financial transaction in which, inevitably, one party asks for so much money that any commercial benefit risks being lost.
Meanwhile, with younger internet-enabled consumers increasingly local, small scale and niche in their interests, “we’ve got to a point where big brands might not even know any more where to look [for relevant collaborators],” he reckons. Valentina Savi goes further: collaborations have too often become predictable marketing exercises that admit to fashion’s inability to keep reinventing the wheel—“and consumers are getting bored of them”.
Huntsman’s Taj Phull concedes that their ubiquity is a problem. “I know people tend to think the collaboration idea is burnt out now, and certainly I think the days when everyone was lining up to work with the likes of Supreme are gone,” he says. “The market just doesn’t want that kind of thing any more”. It means that now Savile Row must tread all the more carefully in the collaborative projects it chooses: to pursue fewer of them and to ensure that those that do proceed have real meaning.
Anna Graham agrees: “There are just so many of these collaborations around [in the fashion world] now and many are not very exciting or seem just for the sake of it,” she says. “I think this means that those that work now tend to be the ones that really feel different, that somehow touch a nerve”. Indeed, she argues that Savile Row’s historically rather closeted ways may work in its favour: “When it does pick the right collaboration you tend to think ‘Ok, now this is interesting’."
It’s not just two sportswear brands doing something together yet again”. Perhaps then, if fashion collaborationsin general may be paling, there is still scope for Savile Row to run with the idea, its rare and storied skill-set—the ability to still hand-make garments in a modern world dominated by machine-making—a perfect foil for other brands’ more cutting-edge technologies or edgy design sensibility. It’s a chance for a real meeting of only superficially incompatible minds, and not just the mutual back-patting of predictably like minds.
“It’s changing, but some houses on Savile Row can seem a little stuck in their ways, while Savile Row [still falls prey] to a somewhat stuffy idea of what it is and what it makes,” says Tristan Thorne, Henry Poole’s senior cutter. “The best collaborations are all part of the process of taking Savile Row’s tradition and modernising it. Something completely bonkers wouldn’t be respectful of Savile Row’s history, but it can’t just always be afraid to try out these new and playful things.”
