The Coat Route by Meg Lukens Noonan Read Free Book Online

assemble and finish handbags in front of spectators. A year later, Hermès would conduct a similar workshop tour, bringing a troupe of leatherworkers and silk screeners to select stores all over the world.
    The global spread of luxury products, meanwhile, also spurred a desire for the custom-made and the one-of-a-kind. People with money to spend were searching for something special that would distinguish them from the increasingly ubiquitous luxury brands.
    “Mass luxury is not luxury at all, because anyone can buy it; it’s available everywhere and produced in enormous quantities. Real luxury is about scarcity,” Patrick Grant, the director of Norton & Sons, a Savile Row tailoring firm, said in an interview in the
South China Morning Post
.
    Even in China, where luxury products are a relatively new concept, discerning shoppers were starting to turn away from labels in search of personalized goods and services with a compelling story behind them—preferably one that was told in a posh British accent. In a fever of Anglophilia, the Chinese were embracing anything that conveyed good breeding and connoisseurship, including polo (which had last been popular in China about seven hundred years ago), cricket, golf, croquet, scotch whiskey, Jaguar automobiles, Victorian oak sideboards, boarding schools—and bespoke.
    And they were descending on the U.K. and Europe to shop.In 2010, the London Luxury Quarter, a consortium of three hundred high-end shops in the West End, including Savile Row, reported that Chinese tourists were spending almost $1,000 whenever they made a purchase—up 155 percent from the previous year. Increasingly sophisticated and knowledgeable Chinese shoppers poured about $470 million into the U.K. economy that year, ten times more than they spent in 2007. Visa applications by Chinese rose by 40 percent—and were expected to surge if, as retailers urged, the government simplified the ten-page application. Harrods and Selfridges both saw double-digit increases in sales to Chinese tourists when they began accepting UnionPay, the Chinese credit card, and added a Mandarin-speaking sales staff. Burberry, the British fashion house, reported that, in 2010, 30 percent of sales in its U.K. stores were to Chinese customers. A company called London Luxury introduced private-car shopping tours to bespoke tailors led by a Mandarin-speaking guide. For an extra $425, customers could go down into the basement to watch the tailors at work. Hilton Hotels launched a Chinese welcome service in four London hotels, providing Chinese-speaking staff, traditional Chinese breakfast food, and in-room Chinese TV, tea, and slippers.Global Blue, a retail-market-research firm, found in a study of Chinese tourists who had come to Europe to shop that many of them were unhappy that they had been unable to spend all their money in the time they had available.
    The Chinese were going on another kind of buying spree in the U.K. By 2012, Chinese companies would own Aquascutum, Gieves & Hawkes, MG Rover, the Birmingham City Football Club, and Weetabix, the quintessentially British breakfast cereal.
    Savile Row tailors didn’t like much of what was happening around them, but they did find reasons to be optimistic. A year after my first visit, in 2010, two hundred students went throughthe pre-apprenticeship course at Newham College; thirty of the best were working alongside master tailors as official Savile Row Bespoke Association trainees. There was also a surge in the popularity of trunk shows, in which tailors traveled to the United States and beyond to hold fittings in hotels. Tailors reported that their customers were getting younger—and they were arriving full of knowledge and opinions derived from studying websites and watching episodes of
Mad Men
.
    Meanwhile, higher labor, materials, and freight costs in Asia, coupled with a general backlash against outsourcing, was spurring a renewed interest in closer-to-home manufacturing and locally