Style
Bespoke becomes affordable
Justin Marozzi gets measured in London for a suit made in Kowloon
He’s the man threatening to do to Savile Row tailors what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners. And he’s proving so successful that Tony Blair is said to be a fan. You’ll have seen his brazenly eye-catching newspaper advertisements with headlines like ‘Even The Price Suits You, Sir!’ and a picture of an Indian man with pursed lips and a slightly unnerving, unwavering stare which seems to convey pathological disapproval of the British male’s slipping sartorial standards.
Raja Daswani, a third-generation millionaire tailor from Hong Kong, is on a mission to rescue the ‘badly dressed and overpaying British customer’. I’m up for being rescued. No question about it. I’m 35 and to my enduring shame have never had a suit made. My only foray into the bespoke world was in Good Looks Tailors of Islamabad, a dubious establishment that boasts the nuclear smuggler A.Q. Khan and President Pervez Musharraf among its clients. The tweed Nehru jacket was not a success.
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jim barnes
March 10th, 2009 2:53amWhat exactly is the definition of "bespoke tailoring"?
Tim
June 19th, 2009 2:58pmJim, I think Raja does made-to-measure as opposed to bespoke tailoring. Bespoke stuff is made to your preferences and measurements but I think these made-to-measure people relate your measurements to certain design templates, not bespoke at all.