The Coat Route: craft, luxury, and obsession on the trail of a $50,000 coat

Scribe Publications

THE COAT ROUTE

Meg Lukens Noonan has written for many publications, including Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Travel + Leisure, Esquire, Men’s Journal, and The New York Times. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two daughters.

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

50A Kingsway Place, Sans Walk, London, EC1R 0LU, United Kingdom

This edition published by arrangement with Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Published by Scribe 2013

Copyright © Meg Lukens Noonan 2013

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The Coat Route is a work of non-fiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Noonan, Meg Lukens.

The Coat Route: craft, luxury, and obsession on the trail of a $50,000 coat / Meg Lukens Noonan.

9781922072559 (e-book.)

1. Luxury. 2. Custom-made clothing.

338.4768714

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

To my parents

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

OSCAR WILDE

The woolen-coat . . . is the produce of the joint labor of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production.

ADAM SMITH

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Roots

Chapter 2: The Fleece

Chapter 3: The Lining

Chapter 4: The Merchant

Chapter 5: The Cloth

Chapter 6: The Buttons

Chapter 7: The Gold Trimmings

Chapter 8: The Tailor

Chapter 9: The Coat

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

INTRODUCTION

Not long ago, I came across a website belonging to John H. Cutler, a fourth-generation tailor in Sydney, Australia. The entire site was devoted to one particular overcoat Cutler had made for a longtime client. The coat was, he wrote, the ultimate expression of the bespoke tailor’s art. At the time, I had only a hazy understanding of what bespoke meant, though I had noticed the word popping up a lot lately. I had seen ads for bespoke bicycle tours and bespoke spa treatments. Virgin Atlantic airlines, I read, had even begun serving drinks in first class with what were called bespoke ice cubes, crafted in the image of founder Sir Richard Branson. I took it to be a Masterpiece Theatre–ish way of saying customized.

While that is basically true, bespoke, it turns out, is a much more specific term than that. The word was born in the tailoring trade in seventeenth-century England. When a customer went to his local tailor to order a garment, he would first select and reserve, or bespeak, a length of fabric. That cloth was then bespoken for. Bespoke evolved to mean one thing and one thing only: clothing made from scratch, using a pattern drafted to the precise measurements and wishes of one individual.

Four hundred years later, tailors, understandably, think of bespoke as their word. I wasn’t surprised to learn that they weren’t happy with the businesses that were using the word to inject their products and services with instant upper-crust British cachet. The tailors were also peeved that some apparel makers were advertising their clothing as bespoke when it was, at best, only partially made to measure.

On London’s Savile Row, the short side street that is the world hub of luxury custom tailoring, a complaint was brought against a company that opened an office there but was making its suits in Germany from only marginally tweaked standard patterns. The petition to stop that firm from calling its wares bespoke was rejected by a British advertising-standards regulating board, however, which said that, essentially, the word was too far out of the barn to be reined back in.

Vivaldi’s stirring Stabat Mater played in the background as I browsed Cutler’s website, scrolling through flowery text and clicking on evocative images. There was John Cutler, silver-haired, sixty-something, thick in the middle, with a tape measure around his neck, bent over a worktable. Here were close-ups of buttons and thimbles and pins, lit like still-life tableaux. A shot of a hand pulling a needle and thread through cloth suggested no less than Michelangelo’s hand of God. And then there was the coat itself, of course, buttoned onto a tailor’s dummy and photographed from every angle.

This was, I gathered, the overcoat to end all overcoats. The garment had taken months from concept to completion, and the tailor had used only the finest materials in the making of it. The coat was made of wool woven from the gossamer fleece of the vicuña, a small llama-like creature found only in the wild on the high plateaus of South America’s Andes Mountains. Softer, lighter, warmer, and far more rare than cashmere, it was, the website declared, the world’s most magnificent cloth—and its most expensive.

For the lining, Cutler had procured a length of the best Italian silk, created by a renowned Florentine designer. The buttons were the ne plus ultra of fasteners, crafted of Indian water-buffalo horn by a 150-year-old English button-making firm. The coat had even been trimmed inside with an eighteen-karat-gold plaque created by the same master hand engraver who was commissioned by the British royal family to craft a signet ring for Prince Charles and the wedding invitations for Princess Diana.

But that wasn’t all. The tailor and his two-man workroom team had made the overcoat entirely by hand, one tiny stitch at a time.

I made the coat as if machines did not exist, Cutler had written.

This, apparently, was highly unusual even in the bespoke-apparel world. The website didn’t come right out and say how much the coat had cost—decorum, and all—but it wasn’t hard to click through some links to press coverage to discover the price. The client paid $50,000 for it.

I studied the photographs of the navy-blue overcoat. The plain, boxy, single-breasted number looked, to my untrained eye, like something you might find on Macy’s clearance rack. I was stumped. And I had a lot of questions.

Why would someone pay that kind of money for a cloth coat that bore no luxury designer label—no Tom Ford, no Burberry Prorsum, no Loro Piana? A generic, if you will. Where was the fun in owning something that was so under the radar that no one but you and your tailor knew how special it was? Who had the patience to wait weeks, even months, for a coat or a suit when you wanted it today? How did bespoke tailors stay in business in an age of instant gratification and overnight shipping? And just who, in these times of economic turmoil, had a spare $50,000 to spend on a wool overcoat?

I was still thinking about that overcoat a few days later, when I was putting away laundry, trying to jam clothes into my teenage daughters’ closets and bureaus, which were already filled to capacity with dresses and tunics and jeans and skirts and sweaters from places like H&M, Target, ASOS, and Forever 21. My closet was in no better shape, overflowing as it was with not-so-great things.

What was all of this stuff? I fingered the fabrics and studied the labels. Much of it contained polyester or some subspecies of it—and almost every piece had been made in China. A lot of it looked worse for wear, but that was something I had come to expect. These were clothes with built-in obsolescence. They might as well have had a use by date on them, like a container of cottage cheese. When they split at the seams or pilled or went out of fashion, I would, if and when I got around to it, load them into big plastic bags and take them to a local thrift shop, or, if they were really not wearable, just toss them in the trash.

How did this happen? When did clothes become disposable? I know it wasn’t this way when I was a kid. Like many of my generation, I grew up shopping with my mother basically twice a year, for spring-summer clothes and fall-winter clothes, mirroring what was, at the time, the traditional two-season cycle of designers and apparel makers. In the late 1980s, globalization started to alter that timetable. Looking for a leg up on the competition, some retailers began to bring in new inventory more frequently. At the same time, a widespread shift of production to China and other developing countries, where labor was cheap and plentiful, allowed apparel makers to reduce prices.

Meanwhile, the design and manufacturing process was speeded up, with instant communication and computerized machinery. Head-spinning turnaround times for products created to meet demand—what manufacturers call JIT, just in time—were now possible. Styles that designers saw on runways one week could be in production, as cheap knockoffs, the next. And shoppers, increasingly savvy about trends thanks to the Internet, lined up outside store entrances to get at the fresh goods.

So-called fast fashion retailers, like Sweden’s H&M, Spain’s Zara (which does most of its manufacturing domestically), the United Kingdom’s Topshop, and the United States’ Forever 21, were brilliant at training us—and especially our daughters—to adapt our shopping patterns to the new normal. What we learned from them, to borrow loosely from Ernest Hemingway, is that there is never any end to shopping.

They also taught us that the clothes we saw in the stores today would likely be gone the next time we came in. New inventory arrives twice a week in Zara’s more than seventeen hundred stores, for example. (One study found that the average Zara customer went into the store seventeen times a year—or about every three weeks.) The short life cycle of the stores’ collections and the high rate of sell-through means very little merchandise is pushed to sale racks. That strategy keeps profit margins high.

Shoppers learned that snoozing meant losing. There was no time to give serious thought to a purchase—and, really, how much thought was required when it came to buying a pair of $10.80 skinny jeans at Forever 21? Almost no financial or emotional investment was needed to walk out of a store buzzing with the pleasure of having made a purchase. Though the rush was short-lived, the next fix was never far away. And so what if our sweaters bagged or our zippers failed? That just gave us license to buy more stuff.

This hamster-on-a-wheel shopping pattern has serious consequences far beyond causing a lot of us to wish for more closet space. The production of synthetic fibers requires millions of barrels of oil. Conventional cotton-growing relies on huge quantities of pesticides. Workers are exposed to toxins and often subjected to poor factory conditions in the around-the-clock race to feed the fashion beast.

Meanwhile, we are running out of places to dump our cast-offs. The Environmental Protection Agency says that Americans discard about thirteen million tons of textiles per year, four times more than we did in 1980, and only about 15 percent of it ends up being recycled. The United Kingdom, which tosses out about a million tons of clothing each year, has a similar rubbish-to-reused ratio. And the mountains of clothing we’re building in landfills are mostly made of non-biodegradable, petroleum-based synthetics. The natural materials we toss do decompose, but as they break down they produce methane, a greenhouse gas that’s thought to contribute to climate change.

Besides clogging our dumps, depleting resources, and fouling the air and water, the fast-fashion model has helped obscure from view the path that clothing takes from raw material to finished goods. I admit to being unsure if, during the manufacturing process, any human hands ever actually touched the things I’m wearing. I’m probably not alone when I say that I feel as blind to the route most of my clothing has traveled as I once did to the chain of events that landed those pre-formed ground-beef patties in the freezer section of my supermarket. Constant consumption has also distanced us from the idea that the things we purchase are special. The ubiquity of disposable clothing has led many of us to the conclusion that much of what we buy has little value.

That vicuña overcoat on John Cutler’s website, on the other hand, was obviously a keeper. It was a slow coat—the very antithesis of most of what was being sold in the mall. It got me thinking.

I started reading books about the bespoke world—lovely books, full of black-and-white photographs of elegant people like the Duke of Windsor, Fred Astaire, and Katharine Hepburn. I read about tailors and weavers and shearers and silk screeners, many of whom were struggling to go on. I went down a rabbit hole of history and found that the story of cloth and clothing is, in many ways, the story of man. I studied the suits and coats men wore in movies and on television. I developed a deep sense of nostalgia for something I had never experienced.

And then it occurred to me that what I really wanted to do was go and see all of this for myself. So I emailed and called almost everyone who had a hand in the making of John Cutler’s vicuña overcoat and asked them if I could visit. Some of them said okay right away. Others hesitated. Some probably thought I was a little strange. Eventually, they all said yes, and I started packing.

Well, let’s be honest. First, I went shopping. Then I started packing.

Plato wrote, Finally, I went to the craftsmen, for I was conscious of knowing practically nothing, and I knew that I would find that they had knowledge of many fine things. In this I was not mistaken; they knew things I did not know, and to that extent they were wiser than I.

In my travels, I did find wise people. I also found some obsessive-compulsive types who spent an astonishing amount of time and money curating their own wardrobes. I got to peek behind the velvet curtain into the clubby, little-seen world of bespoke tailoring, where knowing, not showing is the unofficial mantra. I met men who share what Tom Wolfe, who knows a thing or two about sharp suits, calls the secret vice—men who pride themselves on being able to spot bespoke details, like working cuff buttons and hand-sewn buttonholes, from across a room.

In the company of a renowned researcher, I went high into the Peruvian Andes in search of vicuñas, the skittish, long-necked animals with Kewpie-doll eyes that were almost wiped out by hunters for their valuable fleece and were brought back from near-certain extinction in one of the great conservation success stories of the century. I traveled to Florence to meet Stefano Ricci, the larger-than-life luxury-menswear designer and maestro of silk, who provided Cutler with the overcoat lining. I went to England and watched beautiful worsted cloth come off looms in 150-year-old mills, and saw mottled buffalo-horn buttons being shaped and polished on Victorian-era machines. I ate guinea pig in Lima and truffles in Tuscany.

I watched tailors at work in the basement workshops of Savile Row. I spent time in Sydney with John Cutler, whose personal closet was a museum-worthy collection of handmade sherbet-colored cashmere coats and silk trousers. And I shared some meals with his cast of quirky clients, who, I was relieved to discover, have a sense of humor about their oddball fastidiousness and addiction to bespoke clothing—especially when they are a little drunk on excellent champagne. And I went to see the vicuña coat. I found it draped over the back of a sofa in a penthouse apartment in a Vancouver high-rise.

I discovered a world that is, in many ways, as threatened by extinction as the vicuña was just a few decades ago. Tailors and other traditional tradesmen find it difficult to attract young people into their professions, in part because of limited opportunities for apprenticeships and education, but also because few younger workers are willing to spend years toiling away in an unglamorous back room to become a master in any field. European trade-group leaders have speculated, with deep regret, that the current generation of expert artisans—weavers, leather toolers, carvers, shoemakers, and tailors—might very well be the last.

But I also found some who were thriving, against all odds. Having conceded the low and middle markets to the offshore megafactories, they had headed for the high ground of ultraluxury, which was proving itself, again and again, to be an astonishingly resilient niche. In tough times, the wealthiest of the wealthy—like the man who commissioned the vicuña overcoat—had become even more discerning. They demanded top-quality goods, expert craftsmanship, and, especially, things that no one else could have—all hallmarks of bespoke. Savvy manufacturers had also homed in on developing countries where freshly minted millionaires—many of whom were in Mao suits just a decade or two ago—were realizing that they would need to dress the part.

Of course, most people can’t afford a $50,000 bespoke vicuña overcoat, or even the $6,000 version made of far more pedestrian sheep’s wool, and dropping that kind of money on custom-made clothing might strike some as flat-out obscene. But the fact is that those who can afford such luxuries and choose to spend their money that way are keeping centuries-old trades alive.

I didn’t know anything about tailoring when I set out on the coat route. The zenith of my own sewing career was the creation of a calico wraparound three-armhole dress in seventh-grade home-economics class. I came away from my travels in awe of what talented, skilled people can do with fiber and cloth and thread, and envious of the satisfaction they must feel spending their days crafting beautiful things from scratch. They are makers, something that fewer and fewer of us can claim to be. And they wish for nothing more than to have the good fortune to be allowed to carry on. I wish that for them, too.

CHAPTER 1

The Roots

John Cutler looked up from his cutting table as Keith Lambert walked into his ground-floor tailor shop in the middle of Sydney’s high-rise financial district. Lambert, a strapping forty-three-year-old wine-company executive with the symmetrical, square-ish good looks of a TV anchorman, was impeccably dressed, as always. The tailor recognized the navy pin-striped suit Lambert was wearing as one he had made for him a few years back. The fit, Cutler noted with satisfaction, was still splendid. The shirt, too, was a J. H. Cutler creation of the best Sea Island cotton, and the tie—oh yes, he remembered that one—a luminous Stefano Ricci silk in