GOING BESPOKE

Huntsman: Redefining Savile Row by Tom Chamberlin, Introduction by Nick Foulkes, Photography by Simon Upton (Vendome)

It’s easy to admire beautiful models in a fashion catalogue. But to look through this book about Huntsman, the venerable (since 1849) Savile Row tailor, is to admire not only the garments, but also the history their brand embodies. While Huntsman, like most Savile Row enterprises, was (to use an apt metaphor) tailored to make men’s clothing, its founders realized decades ago that women were just as important to their sartorial enterprise. In 1955, Huntsman made its first pair of trousers for Katharine Hepburn. As Glenda Bailey, former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, writes in the foreword, “Striding across the screen in her signature waist-high, wide-legged trousers, Hepburn made masculine tailoring look strikingly feminine.” In looking through these pages at other clients garbed in Huntsman creations—Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, Winston Churchill, and Josephine Baker—we know that this is where the garments always fit. —David Masello