One Savile Row : the invention of the English gentleman
Gieves & Hawkes Limited, Harold Koda, Alan William John, West, Marcus Binney (Author), Colin McDowell (Author), Peter Tilley (Author), Alasdair Macleod (Author), Jason Basmajian (Author), Simon Crompton (Author), Bruno Ehrs (Photographer)
Fashion sibyl Diana Vreeland, who only occasionally cast her eyes in the direction of menswear, noted that 'Uniforms are the sportswear of the nineteenth century.' In her typically koan-like pronouncement, the quotable editrix summed up a menswear paradox: on the one hand it demanded the impeccable tailoring of military dress, required an immediate visual identification of affiliation and hierarchy with immaculate finish, while on the other the incorporation of hidden and explicit defensive protective details and the accommodation of potentially violent movement. The military uniform, therefore, epitomised extreme function transfigured into exquisite tailored form. Gieves & Hawkes, with its history as the outfitters of the British Army and the Royal Navy, has in its DNA the exceptional technical finesse for apparel that moved between battlefield and ballroom. At 1 Savile Row, the tailor’s thread spools back to the days of the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Lord Nelson. It is a heritage in which the image of valour and heroism is enhanced through the subtle manipulations of cloth and cut, and whose principles and standards today subsume centuries of tailoring knowledge and technical virtuosity into forms of perfectly integrated function
Print Book, English, 2014
English-language edition
Flammarion S.A., Paris, 2014