Thursday, February 10, 2011
Where Great Clothing Comes From
In one of the better things I have seen from that organization in recent years, Esquire commissioned an eight part series of short videos on English clothing manufacture, featuring the ubiquitous Patrick Grant of Norton's as the principal narrator. Over an eight day period the crew drove two thousand miles to film seventeen British institutions, including William Lockie, John Lobb, Fox Brothers and Drake's London.
Highly recommended, but for the advertisement at the beginning. The remainder of the series is here.
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10 comments:
Thanks for posting that Will. I just spent a rather wondeful hour visiting some very familiar places, and some homesick-making accents. Two things: loyalty and justified pride. It is oft forgot that empires were built on that stuff. I'm inspired.
VB
I've watched a couple of them and I'll finish the tour over the next day or so. Funnily enough I bought four Drake ties in BG's sale yesterday.
Good series showing some real gems of what is left. However the presenter is romanticising a little about Britain being built on this sort of thing. These wonderful old places are really just the survivors among the much larger mass production economy that has largely replaced them.
I live in the Netherlands now (since I'm half Dutch), but I was born in Britain and lived there for 30 years. I come from a line of hatters (mostly in Stockport) and these places are finished. The places in the films never really produced for the wider public and even now with the dwindling patronage of the aristocracy they make income from new money in America with the growing desire for 'English tailoring', I won't knock that.
He's wrong about the Chinese not catching up, they will manage to reproduce it since English tailoring was exported to China over two hundred years ago and never left. They've already destroyed the Indian silk hand-weaving market.
Roger, you are so right.
Bravo, thank you for posting.
It is a pity that the presenters come off so arrogant. As is correctly stated in the video, the beauty of British products is one of understated perfection. Unfortunately, there was nothing understated about the way they were presented in it. Certainly, this is an effort to save these peoples' very craft, and it is to be applauded, but humility is always a better marketing strategy than trying to convince consumers that your products can cure cancer and leprosy combined.
Roger said...
I agree with many of the comments in your posting but the internet and globalisation have to some extent been the salvation of these traditional up market manufacturers and retailers. Over the last 25 years the luxury trades have done very well if they know how to market themselves (ask Bernard Arnault) because the market has expanded enormously. Retailers like Hilditch and Key or H & H where I've bought stuff for years were at risk but have made it back from the edge. The challenge is in manufacturing because the real money in lux goods is in retailing. Drake has only existed for 25 years but has carved out a niche for itself by the quality of its product and mail order via the internet. I think Ed Green has only existed for about forty years. Church's future seems secure now they have people who can design and market. Obviously when a product becomes semi obsolete like hats (or buggy whips) there's never going to be a complete revival but I don't believe the overall picture is quite as black as you paint it.
I do agree with Joe about the new marketing and the internet. It is creating a market, here.
By the way, if wandering some of the streets in Rome, Paris and Milan are any indication, I am seeing an awful lot of hat wearing gentlemen. And I don't mean those country beanies either, I mean proper trilbies and fedoras with suits. And they're getting younger.
Don't know about "revival", but there seems to be more and more. Who knows?
I would like to clarify that I did not accuse any of the craftsmen interviewed in the videos of arrogance as might be surmised from my previous comment, but the presenters, or, rather, the presenters’ script. What annoyed me mostly was the advertorial nature of the videos. I mean, they drove around the country with a Jaguar car obviously offered for this purpose by Jaguar International, which they visited in episode 7, mostly touring the companies that E. Tautz and Norton & Sons use to supply their cloth etc. The road trip nature of the whole series worked great and they seemed to be having great fun, but some of the voice-over comments were quite inelegant, like this one: “By day seven, we’d come to realize that whatever a gentleman wears, the best accessory for showing it all off is a Jaguar motorcar.” There was a secondary motive behind the videos except for showcasing the best of British mills, bootmakers, car manufacturers etc, and I found that mildly offensive because I like my advertizing to be blatant, not quiet and unassuming, hidden within a “good cause.” Best part of the video was this moment in episode 6: “There’s the Mazda! They’ve all got Mazdas! Mazda, Mazda, Mazda!” (Attempt at humor aside, I bet the Japanese are very good customers of all the companies visited in the series.)
initials CG said...
You're right, hats are undergoing something of a revival but it's very niche. I'm a hat fan. The other day my wife got a Brit vid from the library from the mid seventies, a secret service thriller, and a lot of people are wearing hats in the street including bowlers. We're no where near a return to a ubiquity of the hat...unfortunately
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