Robert Bailey: British Bespoke, Beyond Borders.
This peripatetic tailor exports the finest Savile Row craftsmanship to the farthest corners of the earth.
It wasn’t just hotels and airlines that suffered because of our inability to travel during the COVID-19 crisis. Though many governments were slow to recognise it, countless industries beyond tourism and hospitality took a hit when the world became a no-fly zone. Bespoke tailoring was one of them.
Travel restrictions meant that international clients (traditionally, a key source of revenue) were no longer able to visit their tailors’ premises. Nor were tailors able to fly out to service customers in their home cities, conducting the ‘trunk shows’ that now generate roughly two thirds of the orders flowing into the spiritual home of sartorial craftsmanship, Savile Row in London’s Mayfair.
Savile Row’s pursuit of overseas business began in earnest in the 1920s, explains Robert Bailey, a British cutter with more than 35 years’ experience in tailoring. “It was initially forays into New York, which is relatively easy to get to from London. That really started just after the First World War, with companies like Anderson & Sheppard, Huntsman and Henry Poole, and several others that are no longer around. They would get on a ship — taking a load of trunks with them, hence the term trunk show — and spend several weeks getting across the Atlantic, then stay there taking orders and fitting clients for a couple of months.”
Today’s trunk shows are generally wrapped up much faster than that, most getting in and out of a location within a few days. “You’re basically packing up as much of the shop into suitcases as you can, setting it up in a foreign location, turning that location into a showroom and a fitting room,” explains Bailey, who tends to operate from a hotel suite or with a retail partner (such as The Decorum in Bangkok and Singapore). “You’ve got to be able to set that up in a couple of hours and also pack it up in a couple of hours, then travel to the next country, at every stop providing the highest quality, bespoke tailoring service experience you can.”
Bailey has specialised in the trunk show model for more than a decade. His first experience in the field came while he was employed as head cutter and production director at Davies & Son, one of the oldest houses on the Row. (Established in 1803, Davies counted Admiral Lord Nelson as an early customer.)
“They’d just acquired tailors Fallan & Harvey,” Bailey says. “Peter Harvey, he was around seventy at the time, getting close to retirement. He was looking after Beams in Tokyo, going there twice a year to do the trunk shows and he wanted to back out of that a little bit. I was asked to shadow Peter on a couple of Tokyo trunk shows with a view to eventually taking it over once he’d completely had enough of all the travel.”
Life on the road isn’t for everyone, but Bailey took to it like a duck to water. “From the first time I did it, I just fell in love with the whole thing: travelling, being in Asia, the food, the people, the culture,” he says. He made such a go of it in the Far East that, when Huntsman (one of Savile Row’s most renowned, respected names, and famously, its most expensive) sought to expand their customer base in that part of the world, it was Bailey they recruited to spearhead the initiative.
“Huntsman’s owner, Pierre Lagrange, he wanted us to establish an Asia trunk show, and he gave us carte blanche, said ‘Go where you want, when you want, just keep doing what you’ve been doing over the road, but for us — especially in China, and any other countries that you think would be beneficial,’” Bailey says. He began visiting Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu, per Lagrange’s instructions to target mainland China, and also planted a flag in Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul.
At that time, the mid-twenty-teens, traditional British tailoring was enjoying a moment in the spotlight thanks to the hit film Kingsman: The Secret Service, which featured a thinly veiled Huntsman in a starring role. Interest was particularly keen below the 38th Parallel. “Something like eighty percent of adults in South Korea saw the movie, with Colin Firth looking so handsome in his double-breasted lightweight flannel suit outside the Kingsman-slash-Huntsman shop,” Bailey says. “That spurred a massive demand for Savile Row tailoring in Seoul.”
Robert Bailey during a Singapore trunk show at The Decorum.
After seven years taking care of Asian clientele for Huntsman, when the house ceased conducting physical trunk shows during the pandemic, Bailey decided to begin crafting garments under his own moniker. “It’s all made by the same tailors, with the same construction, same cloth, same everything. It just has my name on it, not someone else’s,” Bailey says of his creations. He visits Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Chengdu and Beijing four times a year, allowing a fully British-made suit to be delivered to an international client within the same timespan a London resident would enjoy.
“By visiting four times a year, that gives an order a six- to nine-month turnaround, which is a lot more bearable for the customer, and a safer process I think,” Bailey says. “Any longer, someone’s body can change quite a lot. They can lose or gain a lot of weight, change shape. Someone can be dieting and going to the gym one minute, and then fall in love the next minute and be and eating out at fancy restaurants all the time. The shorter the time of the turnaround is, the less risk there is. And of course, people just appreciate it when you get the order done within a reasonable timeframe.”
It's said that a good suit is like a cosmetic surgeon, correcting a man’s physical imperfections, and many of the clients who’ve engaged Bailey’s services for years concur with the medical analogy. “A lot of the guys who have followed me, after I left former employers, they say it’s like a doctor-patient relationship. ‘You’re trusted, you know all of my little characteristics and idiosyncrasies,’ they say, ‘I'd rather stick with you, rather than start all over again with someone else. What you've done for me in the past has been great, I trust you.’ These guys say, ‘I’ll follow you, wherever you go.’”
This sort of loyalty warms the artisan’s heart, says Bailey. “When you’re working for a big house that’s been around for a hundred years, you feel like maybe clients are buying into that brand. The last three years, doing this as Robert Bailey Bespoke, seeing clients track me down and follow me of their own accord — I haven’t hijacked anything at all, they’ve chosen to follow me — that’s been eye-opening,” he says. “To think that actually, yes, they appreciate me, my knowledge and experience and expertise, rather than a high-end label. That has probably been the highlight of starting up on my own. It’s been quite humbling and a fantastic part of this journey.”
For Robert Bailey Bespoke’s latest trunk show dates, visit his website.