The room is on the first floor above a shop, has one large window facing north, and contains a cutting table that has been in the same position since 1991. He has worked here for thirty-four years, alone for the last nine, and he takes about eleven commissions a year now, down from around sixty at the peak.
What thirty-four years does to a room
Everything is where it is for a reason that has been tested thousands of times. The shears live at a specific spot on the table because that is where the hand arrives. The mirror is angled to catch the north light at four in the afternoon. Nothing has been designed and everything has been optimised, slowly, by repetition.
The work itself is less mysterious than the mythology suggests and considerably harder. Cutting is the difficult part, and it is fundamentally a problem of predicting how a flat piece of cloth will behave on a moving three-dimensional body. He talks about it the way a structural engineer talks about load, and with about as much romance.
“People think it is art. It is arithmetic that you have done enough times to stop noticing.”
The tailor, who asked us not to use his name
What happens to the room
He has no apprentice and has not had one for eleven years, which he attributes to the money rather than to any lack of interest. Training somebody to cut takes about five years, during which they are a cost. Nobody has been able to make that arithmetic work in this room since the last recession, and he does not expect anybody to now.
The patterns are the part he worries about. There are several hundred of them, drawn on card, each one a specific person's body recorded over decades — including customers who died years ago and whose sons now come in. They are useless to anybody else and irreplaceable to him, and he has no plan for them.
What five years of training actually buys
Ask what an apprentice would need to learn and the answer is not sewing. Machining is a matter of months. Cutting is the five-year part, and specifically the ability to look at a body standing still and predict how a flat piece of cloth will behave on it when the body moves, breathes and sits down. That is not written down anywhere useful and it cannot be learned from a book or, he is fairly certain, from a screen.
The closest he came to describing the method was in terms of error. You cut, you are wrong, somebody who knows tells you exactly how wrong and why, and you do it again several hundred times. That feedback loop requires a second person in the room who already has the skill, which is precisely the resource that disappears when workshops like this close one at a time.
We asked, before leaving, whether he would recommend the trade to anybody starting out. He thought about it for a while and said yes, but not in London, and not alone — that the work is as good as it ever was and the economics of doing it in a city like this are no longer survivable for one person in one room. Then he went back to the table.
He intends to work for another four or five years. After that the room will be a flat, the table will not fit down the stairs in one piece, and about thirty-four years of extremely specific knowledge will stop being available in E8.
