MAN FRIDAY KEEPING TRADITION ALIVE
Gentlemanly outfitters need our support now more than ever, says Stephen Doig
Tentatively stepping back into Life Before Covid, a stroll down a familiar thoroughfare was a sobering experience. Jermyn St, in the heart of St James’s, is usually bustling with life. The sartorial sibling to Savile Row, it’s the epicentre of all the gentlemanly accoutrements that make a suit sing – the ties, shirts, shoes and pocket squares that go hand in hand. Jermyn St has for centuries catered to the raffish fellow about town, from cigar emporiums to umbrella specialists and a few scandalous clubs in between. But my recent foray was met with empty stores and silent pavements. I half expected a tumbleweed of club ties to barrel past.
“Our turnover is around 17 per cent of what it usually is, and the issue is travel – our customers love to come from abroad to have that traditional English experience in this setting,” says Steve Miller, CEO of traditional shirtmaker Hilditch & Key. At Prince Charles’s favourite Turnbull & Asser a few doors down, “demand has certainly tailed off with the lack of big scale weddings and parties”, says Becky French, creative director. While along Jermyn St, Pink shirtmakers and T.M Lewin have shut shop. There’s been a great deal of talk on how to revive Savile Row, now that men no longer require serious suiting to the same degree and foreign enthusiasts can’t travel, but a whole industry around decking out the well-dressed man is suffering too.
Luckily, extreme necessity has become the mother of invention. “We’ve started to place greater emphasis on our softer, more informal shirting as well as knitwear, and we’re also debuting our first range of shoes with a Northampton shoemaker,” says Miller.
Turnbull & Asser have likewise refocused on less upright and starched shirting, as well as its fine line of sumptuous dressing gowns and nightwear, while historic shoemaker Crockett & Jones has managed a shift towards informality for some time; for the first time in its history its best seller last year was a loafer, not an Oxford. Its shoes run to the more country-ready, so its solid boots have replaced the formal variants normally seen pounding the pavements in the City. At Budd shirtmakers, traffic is down 70 per cent but the brand are innovating by offering customers the chance to exchange their old shirt for three handcrafted face masks, and conducting out-of hours fittings and virtual appointments.
And after this period of style inertia, particularly with new mandates to return to offices, French and Miller believe that a glorious return to proper dressing is on the way. “Being smart will still be relevant, especially after such a long time in loungewear,” says French. And while the full ceremony of a pocket square and tie might seem a leap too far at the moment, there’s something to be said for pressing a shirt and feeling together after our all-at-sea spring and summer. The jacket might not be quite so stiff and upright, but the need for a bit of rigour with our wardrobes won’t disappear entirely. Which is why an amble down Jermyn Street and beyond, mask firmly on, might be just the antidote to months of dress down doldrums.