Fit for Kings

Perhaps no critic of London's Savile Row will ever surpass the wrathful British nobleman who once rode his horse into his tailor's, and while it messed up the carpet complained about his riding breeches: "Too tight at the fork and the kneepan, damn you, too baggy everywhere else!" Last week criticism in the century-old sartorial capital of the male world was being heard once again. The topic was still baggy trousers.

The controversy started when the Duke of Windsor confided that while he still gets his jackets in London, he now gets his trousers at Harris in New York. Agreed British Couturier Digby Morton: "British trousers look nappy. They are too full, too big all over. Pants are to a man what a brassiere is to a woman. They give the figure a line." And in Manhattan a Brooks Brothers executive agreed that "Savile Row has now taken second place to Italy" with its drainpipe trouser effect.

Savile Row doggedly fought back. Snapped one tailor snippily: "Digby Morton is a lady's fashion designer, and it's very noticeable in his pants. We have never admired the American seat." Said another: "We can't vouch for the Windsors." At Henry Poole & Co., oldest of the fashionable Savile Row establishments, a cutter learnedly expounded the theory of the ample trouser leg: "The full thigh acts as a hinge, enabling a man to lift his leg without banging his knee on the front of his trousers."

Fumes of Privilege. All is not yet lost on Savile Row, the "Golden Mile" made up of some 200 establishments on half a dozen streets in Mayfair. In a men's-club atmosphere of horsehair sofas, fireplaces, brass candelabras and rolltop desks, the shops breathe--as one historian noted appreciatively--"the fumes of privilege, of clubs, of Toryism." In keeping with the tradition that put a Savile Row uniform on Napoleon III when he mounted the throne of France, Hawes & Curtis recently finished a $900, gold-braided beauty for Thailand's King Bhumibol, as part of a 113-suit wardrobe. At Denman & Goddard's, cutters have been diligently remaking a drainpipe-trousered bohemian into the royal fashionplate that is Antony Armstrong-Jones.

But, conceded the head of one firm, "winds of change are blowing." Last week John Morgan & Co. dispatched swatches of material, in blues and greys, from which Senator John F. Kennedy will pick his fall suits. Another firm was making 30 suits for a Texas tycoon. Thirty Savile Row firms now have agents in the U.S., and some do 90% of their summer business with American tourists. Under pressure from such lucrative customers, most will now cut suits along slimmer American lines, and some have even consented to make drainpipe trousers devoid of "turnups" (cuffs).

Noble in Purpose. The clash of tastes is sometimes painful on both sides. A Madison Avenue adman, opening the door to one of the Row's austerer shrines, took one look and fled--"I thought maybe I had to be elected." One cutter, gingerly removing a Brooks Brothers jacket from a customer, murmured reproachfully: "Not, I think, one of ours, sir." But despite the awesome atmosphere and the great trousers schism, Americans keep coming to Savile Row for tailoring that is as smooth, in one cutter's words, as "a millpond in a heat wave." For it is hard to resist tailors whose purpose, avows Gerald Abrahams, chairman of the British Men's Wear Guild, is to "make you look stronger and slimmer and younger and richer."

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