Tailor Row: Dress Yourself!

In 1640, tailors gathered on London’s Savile Row to begin handcrafting the world's finest suits. Their stretch of shops known today as the “golden mile of tailoring” serves the essential masculine attire dressing storied figures like Lord Nelson, Winston Churchill and even Jude Law.

The suits stitched with finest fabrics like hand sheared wool and soft eastern silk require a customer to be custom fitted at the tailor’s hands. Each piece is a payment in time (100 hours), coinage (£5000-£10000) and trust (immeasurable) between the tailor and the customer as each acknowledges without the other they can cannot create something akin to a work of art.

A tailor enjoys a cigarette as he sews a shirt at Henry Poole and Co. on London's Savile Row (1944).

This post isn’t about clothes. Rather it is a tailored image of favor and its impact on a person.

Arthur Ashe, the American athlete once said,
"Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance."

A new suit highlights a favored man. They reflect his status and how he is presented to the world. It changes how people perceive you and ultimately how you are received. But the exterior refinement for all its beauty does little for one’s soul.

A man cannot be a good without a garment of praise. It is the very article that distinguishes.

But it is easy to forget that, to sink into despair looking at what is happening in our world. It is easy to watch the worst of humanity’s cruelty and nature’s power and become changed ourselves. If we are honest, each passing day, our minds are easily becoming stained by the sorrow around us.

London famous for Savile Row was also notorious for it coal filled air. Brick homes, majestic statues, swift carriages and living men and women would perpetually be bathed in a darkness that Charles Dickens once described in Bleak House as:

“Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun….”

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