🧵The Greats

In 1860 Princess Pauline von Metternich, the Austrian ambassador's wife, wore a Worth gown she had bought for 300 francs to a ball at the Tuileries. Empress Eugénie demanded the next morning to know who had made it, and summoned him; imperial patronage followed, and with it every court in Europe. Metternich later joked that from that day on, no one ever got a Worth dress for 300 francs again.

In 1868 Keckley published Behind the Scenes, an intimate memoir of the Lincoln White House written partly to defend Mary Lincoln from public ridicule over her debts. Washington society read it as a servant's betrayal; Robert Lincoln pressured to have it suppressed, her clientele evaporated, and she died poor. The book outlived the scandal: historians now treat it as an indispensable primary source on the Lincoln marriage, and the Smithsonian holds gowns attributed to her needle.

Scholte dressed the Duke of Windsor for some three decades and never once bent his rules for him: the Duke recorded Scholte's 'rigid standards' in his memoir, and because Scholte refused to cut trousers in the loose style the Duke wanted, the most photographed dresser of the age wore Scholte coats with trousers made by other tailors — eventually in New York, an arrangement menswear historians retell with the Duke's own joke about 'pants across the sea.'

In 1952, at Giovanni Battista Giorgini's fashion shows in the Sala Bianca of Florence's Palazzo Pitti, Brioni sent men down a catwalk — the first men's runway show in fashion history, an idea considered faintly scandalous at the time. American buyers ordered on the spot, US tours followed, and Hollywood arrived. Brioni later founded a tailoring school in Penne named after Fonticoli, and decades on dressed Pierce Brosnan's James Bond from GoldenEye onward.

Nutters had been open barely six months when, on 8 August 1969, the Beatles walked across a zebra crossing for the cover of Abbey Road — John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr all in Nutter suits, George Harrison alone in denim. The most reproduced album cover in history became a bespoke advertisement no house could have bought, and the Stones, Elton John and Bianca Jagger followed through Nutter's scandalously open shop windows.

Ramroop has described arriving in London in 1970 with a few pounds and finding that skill alone did not open the fitting room: early employers kept him sewing out of sight because customers, he was told, were not ready to be measured by a Black tailor. He answered by buying the house. As owner of Maurice Sedwell he cut for prime ministers and celebrities, and made clothes privately for Diana, Princess of Wales, in the mid-1990s.

When Sargent opened Kathryn Sargent Bespoke at No. 37 Savile Row in April 2016, the milestone was reported worldwide: in a trade whose guilds had excluded women for most of its nine hundred years, and on a street that had employed women for generations as seamstresses and finishers but never before as the name over the door, a woman now owned the pattern, the cut and the business. She cuts for both men and women, and trains apprentices of both.