Journey of a $50,000 coat

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. 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 Richard Branson. I took it to be a way of saying customised.

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 17th-century England. When a customer went to his local tailor to order a garment, he would first select and reserve a length of fabric. That cloth was then “bespoken” for.

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Barrels of wool ‘rovings’ at Spectrum Yarns, in Slaithwaite, England. Photograph: Meg Lukens Noonan

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.

Some 400 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 uppercrust cachet. I browsed Cutler’s website. There was the tailor, silver-haired, sixtysomething, 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, buttoned onto a tailor’s dummy and photographed from every angle.

The garment, I read, 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 in the Andes mountains.

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 18-carat gold plaque created by the same engraver who was commissioned by the British royal family to craft a signet ring for Prince Charles.

The tailor and his two-man workroom team had made the overcoat entirely by hand, “as if machines did not exist”.

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 a department store clearance rack.

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 bureaux, which were already filled to capacity with jeans, sweaters and shirts from places such as H&M, 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 was polyesterand 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. 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.

When did clothes become disposable? Like many of my generation, I grew up shopping with my mother twice a year, for spring-summer clothes and autumn-winter clothes, mirroring what was, at the time, the traditional two-season cycle of designers and apparel makers. In the late 1980s, globalisation started to alter that timetable. 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 labour was cheap and plentiful, allowed apparel makers to reduce prices.

'Fast fashion'
Meanwhile, the design and manufacturing process was speeded up, with instant communication and computerised machinery. 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 the fresh goods.

So-called “fast fashion” retailers, such as Topshop in the UK, Sweden’s H&M, Spain’s Zara and Forever 21 in the US, were brilliant at training us to adapt our shopping patterns. They taught us that the clothes we saw in the stores today would likely be gone the next time we came in. Shoppers learned that 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 skinny jeans? 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.

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 round-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 13 million tons of textiles per year, four times more than in 1980, and only about 15 percent of it ends up being recycled. The UK, 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. 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 got me thinking. I started reading books about the bespoke world – lovely books, full of black-and-white photographs of elegant people such as 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 was go see all of this for myself. So, I contacted almost everyone who had a hand in the making of the vicuña overcoat and asked them if I could visit. Eventually, they all said yes, and I started packing.

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

I went high into the Peruvian Andes in search of vicuñas. I travelled 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 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-coloured 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 humour 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 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 ultra-luxury, 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.

Of course, most people can’t afford a $50,000 overcoat, or even the $6,000 version made of 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 are keeping centuries-old trades alive.

I didn’t know anything about tailoring when I set out on the coat route. I came away from my travels in awe of what talented, skilled people can do with fibre 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.

The Coat Route: Craft, Luxury, &
Obsession on the Trail of a $50,000 Coat, by Meg Lukens Noonan, is published by Scribe, £8.99