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Saturday 22 November 2008

The king-makers

James Sherwood apprises the Savile Row tailors who dress royalty

Shortly before Christmas Mr Garry Carr, head of Gieves & Hawkes’ military department, received a telephone call from the Tonga high commission in London to ask if His Majesty King George Tupou V could visit No 1 Savile Row to discuss uniform requirements for his August coronation. ‘As Gieves & Hawkes holds three royal warrants for the British royal family this often provides a significant interest from a number of overseas royal houses to provide ceremonial uniform and regalia,’ says Carr.

The multimillionaire bachelor King, 60, developed a passion for British military uniforms during his years at Sandhurst and had patronised Gieves as crown prince, as did his father. The Gieves & Hawkes archive still has the late king’s patterns — verifying the Guinness Book of Records entry that the 33-stone king was the world’s fattest monarch — and photographs of the coronation regalia made for him in 1965.

Like Kaiser Wilhelm, an avid collector of Savile Row-tailored military uniforms, King George Tupou dictated that his 17 diplomatic uniforms and 12 military-style uniforms for the August coronation week be modelled on the British style. In addition to his personal regalia, King George Tupou commanded Gieves to follow British pre-war diplomatic and court dress regulations to dress his entire court.

For military and ceremonial tailors such as Gieves, Ede & Ravenscroft, Henry Poole and Dege & Skinner, a coronation commission is little short of a lottery win. The Row does not anticipate a British coronation for many years to come and would benefit little, considering the English peerage’s habit of holding onto things. Dege chairman Michael Skinner, who attended the 1953 coronation, says, ‘Peers and peeresses robes are stored by the tailors and simply tarted up when the next coronation comes along. Many date back to the 1902 coronation of Edward VII. So a British coronation isn’t really the jackpot. But foreign royal houses are another matter entirely.’

More articles from: James Sherwood | this section

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