Tailors’ Customers Include Kings, Queens and Wealthy Commoners

Savile Row has been synonymous with conservative men’s fashions since the mid-1880s, when Henry Poole & Co. opened its back door onto the street.

Other tailors soon followed. The influx of tradesmen so upset wealthy doctors living in the fashionable residential neighborhood that they fled en masse to Harley Street, which today is synonymous with medicine.

Anderson & Sheppard are known as the royal tailors, although several windows on the row prominently display royal warrants, proving they do business with Buckingham Palace and foreign royals as well.

A bespoke suit--the term comes from bespeaking your individual requirements--should last a decade, if it hangs in the closet for six days between wearings to let the wool recover its bounce.

It takes about five to six weeks to make.

Henry Poole & Co. made an exception once, in 1936, when King Boris of Bulgaria arrived at Buckingham Palace on a state visit without his tails.

The firm’s tailors, urgently summoned to the palace, took the king’s measurements in the morning, had the entire workshop labor on the outfit all day and delivered it to him in time for the evening banquet.

Other Savile Row customers, past and present, include former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, composer Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, musician Eric Clapton and Queen Noor of Jordan.

Napoleon had his military tunics made by Henry Poole, which later served Charles Dickens, the explorer David Livingstone, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Sir Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.