‘Parasites.” “At least they’re not Boots.” “They’ll last five minutes.” Sean Dixon is remembering what his neighbours said to the press about the British tailor Richard James when it opened on Savile Row back in 1992. Dixon was there at the time, a co-founder together with the eponymous designer, and now, 32 years later, he can take satisfaction in the fact that he’s proved those early detractors wrong.
Dixon is sitting in the cocktail bar on the first floor of the newly refurbished House of Richard James on Clifford Street, just off Savile Row, an entire Georgian townhouse that overlooks another Richard James store on the corner of Savile Row, albeit a more modern, glass-windowed affair. Dressed in a brown Prince of Wales check suit, pale blue cotton twill shirt with bright “Richard James blue” knitted tie and brown suede Walton loafers, he’s a good poster boy for the brand, which from its early days has attracted a different kind of customer to the traditional Savile Row emporia.
Last month Dixon hosted a party to launch the £2 million refurb. A crowd of customers and friends gathered to wish him well. Although he’s coy about the guest list, let’s just say that Richard James-wearing A-listers include Jacob Elordi, Barry Keoghan, Theo James, Andrew Garfield, Stormzy, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch and Simon Pegg. Oh and Brad Pitt, John Legend, Michel Cera and Chris Pine. With its swanky new home and of-the-moment celebrity endorsements, Richard James would appear to be in rude health.
But it was not always the case. “Our reception was cool, to say the least,” Dixon says of Richard James’s arrival on the Row. “I think a lot of the houses thought we’d be gone soon and tried to ignore us. But although it was tough to start with, we stuck it out and found a clientele that what we did resonated with. Now three decades later — which of course is a blink of an eye when compared to a lot of the tailoring houses here but nevertheless feels pretty substantial to us — I’m told we’ve progressed from being the upstarts to the new establishment.” And have the neighbours accepted you? “I think Savile Row respects what we do now, and I think we’ve helped Savile Row move on.”
Back in 1992, Dixon says that Savile Row was a bit down on its luck. The stores didn’t open at the weekend and few people walked down the street unless they had a destination in mind. But he and Richard James had a plan — to modernise British tailoring for a new customer. “We liked the idea of a cut with a nod towards a British-made suit, vented at the back, waisted, with ticket pockets and slanted pockets, nothing too unusual, but introducing interesting fabrics and colours: a lime-green sweater under a tweed suit with a hint of yellow running through it, that sort of thing.”
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And why Savile Row? “It had this amazing tradition of tailoring — Winston Churchill and Charles Dickens shopped there. But so did film stars like Fred Astaire, and in the 1960s and 1970s you had the Beatles.” Indeed the Fab Four were not only customers but also opened their Apple Corps HQ on the street and performed their last ever public live gig on the roof of number 3.
Soon Richard James was open on Saturdays and Sundays. The Britart and Britpop crowd were coming in: Damien Hirst, Damon Albarn, the Chapman brothers and Jarvis Cocker. Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit were married in white Richard James suits in a nod to John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Leaning into the disruptive rebellious label they’d been given, Dixon and James set about pushing the boundaries — and the buttons — of Savile Row. Apart from doubling down on colour and pattern, they introduced humour: a camouflage suit, which a journalist wore to meet Prince Charles, and one inspired by SpongeBob SquarePants (yes, really). And when the wool marketing board staged a promotion on the Row, Richard James filled its windows with 300 inflatable sheep. On the tenth anniversary of the store those same windows would be emblazoned with some of the snarky comments from their fellow tailors that had greeted them when they first opened.
But now it’s time to reset. “You’ve got to move with the times, and your customers,” Dixon says. “Today we make softer, more relaxed pieces. If our remit is to make tailoring attractive, we have to react to what people want. It’s that simple. When we started we’d be using 15 or 16-ounce wool for a bespoke suit. No one wants that now — it’s 9 or 10 ounces, maximum.”
One change in Richard James’s favour is the perception of the suit as a sartorial choice rather than workwear duty. “Because people don’t have to wear a suit, it’s become much more of a fashion statement,” Dixon explains. And with that shift colour and more unusual fabrics have been embraced. “Last winter our biggest-selling suit was pink corduroy.”
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Another thing that has changed, he adds, is the customer’s expectations of the suit-buying process. “Today you need to offer — and I know it’s a cliché to say this but nevertheless — an experience. That’s why we’ve created the House of Richard James.”
And so the grade II listed Georgian townhouse, the only white building on Clifford Street, has been transformed into a type of three-storey gentlemen’s lounge. Housing ready to wear on the ground floor and made to measure and bespoke upstairs, the place has been put together by the interior designer David Thomas to reflect the brand’s history of colour and pattern and British quirkiness. Striped curtains are inspired by silk ties and rugs by pocket-square patterns; there’s a polka-dot carpet, a 1970s Murano-glass chandelier and limited-edition prints by Albert Irvin, Marc Quinn and Howard Hodgkin. And those walls are orange, blue, yellow, pink and red.
“This lovely Georgian building has a history of being a tailor’s. It was 150 years ago — it’s got it built into its fabric. They would have lived upstairs and worked downstairs.” And today the basement still houses artisans practising the same trade: Richard James tailors work on bespoke orders on the premises.
Meanwhile, the first-floor cocktail bar is a place where Dixon hopes people will feel free to pop in for a drink. “Tailors on Savile Row are called houses because they are literally in townhouses. But I want this to be not just a house but a home. We’ll be hosting talks and events here too, and selling one-off designs and limited editions. But the most important thing is that you feel welcome when you enter. Buying a suit can feel intimidating, so we wanted to create a place where people can spend time and be helped through the process, whether they are buying ready to wear or having a suit made. We want them to look at fabrics, at patterns — get involved. It’s all about the details, and men love details. It should be a very pleasant experience.”
Richard James suits start at £1,500 for off the peg, from £2,000 for made to measure and about £6,000 for bespoke, richard-james.com
