Graham Browne: A Bespoke Guide (Part II)

The Baste

On the second visit to Graham Browne, with colour palette, cloth and composition discussed with fervor the baste can begin. It's in this refined procedure that the subtle nuances of bespoke can really be appreciated.

When buying off the peg, even made to measure, the garment will always be to a formulaic template, assuming that this will be suited to the majority of it's consumers. However, the discretion that can be applied when going bespoke at somewhere like Graham Browne is endless. From the height and cut of the arm holes to the slope of the shoulder, the width of the lapel to the composition of buttons on a double breasted coat or jacket, working cuffs and side adjusters for your trousers. These details which are lost in the mass market are applied to show a competent craft.

Again, it is GB's nonconformist attitude which really warrants a championing here. The house cut for a tailors will typically dominate, at very least, to some extent the look of your garment and it's easy to understand why when specific styles like Huntsman's single button or Anderson & Sheppard's peak lapels are so revered. It would be simpler to cut a dash in a bid to garner a cult following, however at GB the commitment is to the client and giving them exactly what they want, a truly bespoke experience.

For the baste fitting you move from a series of flat panel cloths to build up a prototype of your garment. Once the pattern is cut and struck it is passed to the coat maker to make a baste for the first fitting. The baste is a process of temporarily sewing the panels together loosely so as to create the basic form. This paper panel composition now allows for any adjustments. Adjustments to the major structure of the garment can now be finalised, fittings like the chest canvas and shoulders can be tweaked into place and prepared for final procurement.

For future fittings these paper patterns are kept in the records at GB.

Part I

Salvatore Piccolo @ Pitti85

Salvatore Piccolo is the embodiment of our interpretations of Neapolitan style, casual tailoring and unstructured compositions for the warm weather of the Italian south coast.

For the winter period they retain their relaxed aesthetic but with slightly heavier fabrics, tweeds, wool and heavy gauge cottons to beat the falling temperatures.

At Pitti in January this is what the Napoli based menswear company had to offer:

Photo Source: Men's Reverie

In Conversation with Dashing Tweeds

With a bitter cold wind whistling through Camden Road train station it was mostly the promise of a cup of tea that was so exciting about this particular Saturday morning. Although upon our arrival at the head quarters of Dashing Tweeds and our meeting Guy Hills, a slight character in an exquisitely cut green, purple and yellow tweed (DT's own) waistcoat and jodhpurs with a broad smile, it was clear that this was a man with more than just a fleeting interest in changing a boreish market.

At a glance it would be easy to dismiss Hills as an eccentric dandy, which for all intents and purposes he is, but not just for the theatre of it. A photographer by trade, he is well aware of his projected image. His keen eye for aesthetically pleasing visuals and design are an immediate presence as we are invited in, his kitchen sink set within an antique apothecary cabinet adapted for him by his brother and filled with an extensive collection of snuff boxes made from shells and precious metals. As we scale the stairs down to his showroom he tells us that we've come at a good time, the place is filled with stock and fittings to furnish a new shop which should be signed and delivered early in the coming week.

Before firing any questions off we sit for a cup of tea and discuss Guy's plans to better equip his jetty than his current row boat which sports a slight covering of moss and a puddle of rain water. We venture past a work bench, vice poised and accompanied by press studs, into the more studious areas. Here there are a couple of promotional films made in corroboration with suppliers to show the more inquisitive customer what the process of weaving the tweeds, way up in the Scottish borders, and screen printing their silk scarves, deep down in Deptford in South London, entails. A dedication to British production and industry which although well publicised is refreshing to see in practice.

Dashing Tweeds was first envisaged in 2006 by Hills and woven textile designer Kirsty McDougall and presented formally in 2011. Their website addresses the brand as a tweed textile and menswear company with a dedication to challenging the market with elegance, colour, heritage, technology and humour among others. Committed to collaborating with partners from fashion and interior design to architects and scientists. It's more of a mission statement than an ethos and their creative diversity is intriguing.

Q: How did you make the transition from photographer to founding Dashing Tweeds?
Guy: That was quite an easy transition really because I was always interested in fashion from a young age and my stepmother was a dressmaker who taught me to sew. So I would earn money during the school holidays sewing hems for, I also liked making myself clothes. Whilst working as a fashion photographer I has this sudden realisation, hanging out on beaches with beautiful girls. I was just a cog in a machine and what I was selling were high street clothes, making all this shit look really good. Then a lucky thing happened and I was asked by Esquire to do some portrait work and during this assignment I met Andrew Bolton curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He introduced me to Andrea Rowland, head cutter at Anderson & Sheppard, who was founding the Savile Row Bespoke Association and needed a photographer to be the image maker for the organisation. I was given 'carte blanche' to go to every tailor on the row, who up to this point had been a very closeted, and told I could photograph all I wanted. The tailors said they hadn't very much cash but we can pay you in tailoring, so I ended up getting a suit made by almost every tailor in exchange for all this work over the course of around 5 years. The work was exhibited at an event called 'The London Cut' curated by James Sherwood and accompanied by a book called 'Savile Row'. Whilst I was looking through the archives I thought, wow, men used to have so much fun with their clothes and there was such a wide variety of materials, then you look at the current trends and its all, grey grey grey, blue blue blue. I thought, 'where's all the fun gone?', every man was his own designer, he could add such a varied range of extra details such as fishtail back on trousers and all those things that you can't really do for ready to wear. You think as you're growing up that you are 'where it's at' and that menswear is the most sophisticated it's ever been then you realise that we're really in the doldrums. Then I met Kirsty who was a weave designer at the Royal College of Art, whilst looking for a stylist to work with at my photography studio. I asked her to weave me a one off bespoke tweed and then had the material cut in Savile Row and ended up getting completely sidetracked from my commercial photography and that, in a nutshell, was were it all started.

Q: What influenced your decision to specialise in tweed?
G: I never sat down with a business plan, these decisions were led by things that I liked and seeing that there was a gap in the market. As a photographer I was always riding around on my bike to various agencies to get work, you want to look smart but be comfortable so I was wearing my dad's old tweed jackets and they looked slightly out of place and of course if you're trying to sell a specific look as a photographer, you need to portray an image and I wanted to adopt something that was interesting and relevant. So I looked around and couldn't find anything so I created it.

Q: There's been a great deal of interest in British produce recently, do you think that will continue?
G: That's a really interesting question, I'm not an economist but manufacturing in England has become very expensive so it's unsustainable at one level. At luxury level, we have a great reputation for quality so the really important thing for the factories is to make sure they maintain that reputation. The quality is what people will pay for. If you go to factories around London in Tottenham and Edmonton trying to get the quality is difficult, but having said that I have found manufacturers and I've also joined the UKFT who have an initiative called 'let's make it here', and they're really helping factories. The whole idea is that should someone have the initiative to make things here they should have the support to be able to produce the absolute best in terms of quality.

Q: What did you think of Jeremy Hackett's comment that he didn't trust British tailoring and that our textile industry is incapable of making his Essential British Kit?
G: I can totally sympathise with him, we're negotiating with factories at the minute. We're putting everything on the line to make this work. If they can't stick to timelines and guarantee quality it's impossible. However the UKFT aims to create a code of conduct and the factories enter into a contract and sign a contract to provide orders on time. It's difficult because the factories owners have lots of people who are not very well paid working and they need to profitable too. What's interesting starting a small business, ordering from the mills in Scotland if we collaborate we order twice as much and that's twice as much work for the factories and that's nice, to know that we are directly helping the country. We wouldn't be able to exist if there were not these mills with their fantastic history and we're very grateful for that.

Q: You've collaborated with brands like Boxfresh and Converse, was that a conscious decision to try to lure in a young customer, a high street customer who may not be aware of the diversity of tailoring?
G: Exactly, we want to broaden our appeal. We are very much about be a creative company we're a very tight creative company Kirsty, me and Holly, it's all about making exciting things but if you don't get that out to a wide audience you can't progress. So the plan was to make a cloth and then collaborate with people on one level so we could get to that wider audience. The brands Boxfresh and Converse are very interest in our ideas so that is brilliant. We've also collaborated on some bags with a company called Knapsack as well, we will collaborate with loads of people. You need to realise were your strengths lie and ours is in design and our weave design.

Q: What do think of the perception that tweed is for the countryside and eccentrics?
G: Traditionally a man's wardrobe would have a tweed suit for going to the country and worsted wool suit for work and maybe a linen suit for summer. Our interest is in tweed as a sportswear, and for us making that sportswear modern. The advantages of tweed are that the fabric wicks sweat away from your body and that the moisture evaporates quicker than in cotton, it also doesn't smell. The only reason really why it was not seen in town traditionally was that it was considered a sportswear and a relaxed dress.

Q: On your website you list one of your mantra as humour, how does that translate to the brand?
G: You have to enjoy yourself, and especially if you look at the history of menswear with sports and tweed, a lot of it is about having fun. Working all week then finally being able to relax at the weekend, traditionally people went bonkers with checks. That's how people had fun. We've forgotten how to have fun, people have fallen on hard times recently and the 70's is probably the last time anybody had any fun. I experienced the rave, chemical generation but people didn't really dress up. When I started going to big raves in fields people would be wearing crazy things during that acid house generation but that is not the case any longer.

Q: Do you feel the current incarnation of menswear is too serious?
G: Definitely, I think the whole market has been swayed and it's only women who get to have fun. Men are pressured to not stand out from their peers.

Q: When did you become aware on your own personal style?
G: I think it comes to everyone at around 8 or 9 years of age, and your mum comes home with some more clothes from down the market and you start to think, 'there's no way I'm wearing that'. It's time to start shopping. But really once I discovered my step-mother could sew and I was able to make stuff for myself that was the beginning of my development.

Q: Who has been the biggest influence of your own style?
G: I genuinely feel as though it has not been influenced necessarily by one individual but rather by my experiences. When you're younger you may have certain idols, but I'd always been a fan of the old fashioned hero, a gentleman, a swashbuckling knight of a character. The well dressed Englishman as a concept, David Niven, that type of character or a cross between James Bond and Bertie Wooster.

Q: What's next for Dashing Tweeds?
G: The shop, hopefully. Having a proper showcase, to have bricks and mortar and be part of that scene and to show people that men's fashion and quality can move on. Also to maintain the sense of luxury in quality and innovation and all it's forms.

Trickers @ Pitti85

It seems odd that up until now I haven't mentioned Tricker's on the blog, as part of that fabled group of Northampton shoemakers it almost seems a given that they are on everyone's radar.

This season at Pitti they really put in a strong show for AW14 and as well as their customary use of colour on country brogues they show an adept use of leather and mix contrasting textures to breathe life into some classic styles, marrying smooth calf leather with pebble grain to epic effect. Other highlights include a forest green suede split toe derby. Enjoy:

Photo Source: Men's Reverie

LC: M with Paul Costelloe

Amid the manic, madness and mayhem of the Mens Collections in London, at the adopted home of the BFC The Hospital Club on the second floor we met with the inimitable Irish designer Paul Costello to find out how the industry is changing and what the Collections is doing for London's stake as the home of menswear.

Q: As someone who has been in the industry for over 30 years, how has LC: M changed the market?
Paul: London's Menswear Collections has been running for four seasons now, I think it will become more relevant and I think it's a wonderful opportunity for British designers showing British fabrics and promoting British makers. It's still quite small, and it is clashing with Pitti, maybe we could sort out the dates a little better but I think it's a special place, that's what I'd call it at the moment, special.

Q: What prompted your decision to join the Collections?
P: Well number one, it's quite reasonable which does help if you're a small menswear design company. Number two, the standard here is exceptionally good compared to ladieswear it's of a very high quality I think that's wonderful. Menswear people are very unique they're not here today and gone tomorrow it's a greater commitment, it takes a lot longer to be a success and there's just a wonderful atmosphere. There's also a great loyalty among male customers in that once someone establishes a relationship with a retailer, it lasts and that is very comforting.

Q: LC: M promotes London as the home of menswear, would you agree with that sentiment?
P: I do I think you have to go back to Victorian times, characters like Sherlock Holmes, men's fashions have dominated it's history. Also the wonderful mills in the North of England, Yorkshire, i's a great tradition, a lasting moniker of the Empire, it's in the country's DNA.

Q: Having worked in France, Italy, New York & Dublin, why did you choose to settle in London?
P: I settled here because I have a large family and I wanted to give them a bigger picture of the world when I was living in Dublin. It's OK being the big fish in a small pond but I prefer being the small fish in a much bigger pond.

Q: What's next for Paul Costelloe?
P: We're looking at (expanding) China, we're launching in Australia at the end of February with David Jones and that will be our first time in Australia so, the eastern continent.

Q: Can we expect to see you at LC: M in June and next year?
P: Of course, definitely.

We also had a closer look at the AW14 collection which, with emphasis on fabric and colour, is steeped in tweeds and tartans:

A big thank you to Paul for taking the time to chat and to Matt Coles at Chase PR.

Oliver Spencer AW14

London Collections: Men (Day 3)

Video Presentation here.

Photo Source: BFC