New York - It’s the first break of a
whirlwind, five-day business trip for Patrick Grant, the 44-year-old owner of
Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons, and he wants to talk about buttons.
Specifically, how his jacket doesn’t have any sewn onto the cuff, unlike the traditional
British bespoke suit, which has two working buttons and two dummies at the end
of each sleeve.
“There’s
just no need,” he says as he lays a napkin in his lap and tucks into an Ugly
Burger at the National, Geoffrey Zakarian’s restaurant inside New
York’s Benjamin
Hotel. “It’s extraneous
stuff that doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
Since
buying Norton & Sons in 2005, Grant has become one of the most convincing
voices for bringing stodgy British menswear into the informal future. Today
he’s wearing an unstructured wool-fresco suit of indeterminate colour. “It’s
kind of gray and brown,” he says. “An odd combination—but I like it a lot.”
Although
the light weight of Grant’s suit gestures toward the house’s early-1900s heyday
as a colonial outfitter, his New York trip recalls the midcentury tradition of
sending tailors on annual 28-city tours to fit customers in the US Later in the
afternoon, he’ll attend client appointments for Norton & Sons, where a two-piece
suit starts at about $3 500. In the evening, he’ll take a meeting at
Bloomingdale’s on behalf of E. Tautz, his
youthful, ready-to-wear line, designed with an eye for understated colors and
an avant-garde play of shapes.
In between,
his phone buzzes with business related to other brand extensions and the looming
prospect of the fifth season of The Great British Sewing Bee, a genial
BBC2 reality show. In his role as a judge, he delivers Tim Gunn-style
notes on craft, paired with the face of a young Ernest Hemingway.
Reinventing ideas
If time
permits, Grant will squeeze in a trip to 10 Ft. Single by Stella Dallas,
his favourite Brooklyn thrift store. He has a
knack for hitting the inspirational jackpot in such places. “I found this
amazing shirt in a flea market in Rome
last May,” he says. “We took the idea of that oversize shirt—narrow cut,
big sleeves, weird pockets, clearly from the early-to-mid-’80s—and that has
become one of the best-selling things we do.”
Grant’s
whole career resembles an extended rescue-and-recovery mission. He grew up in Edinburgh, where his
formative exposure to fashion was his father’s modish Sixties suits, which
Grant began wearing when he was 14. After graduating from the University of Leeds
with an engineering degree, he spent nine years marketing fiber optics, then
went to the Saïd Business
School at Oxford for an MBA he had no specific plan to
use.
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Then, while
paging through the Financial Times, he saw an ad that listed Norton & Sons
for sale. Founded in 1821, the house was not as old as Henry Poole (which
conceived the tuxedo), nor as innovative as Anderson & Sheppard (which
developed the drape suit for the Duke of Windsor), but it had once counted Cary
Grant (no relation) and Kaiser Wilhelm II as clients. In more recent years, the
company had attempted to diversify by selling guns and offering sporting tours,
and by the time Grant bought it, it had only 20 clients.
Grant
streamlined the focus to tailoring and balanced the house’s traditional
approach with a forward-thinking perspective—like removing buttons from jacket
cuffs and back pockets from trousers. His ability to discern what he calls the
“subtle difference between a cloth that feels contemporary and one that feels
old-fashioned” has made Norton a favorite among the style cognoscenti.
Niche
Norton
& Sons is still small, making fewer than 300 suits a year. But in 2009,
Grant revived E. Tautz, a trademarked name that was part of the deal; it’s
now carried by J.Crew in the U.S.
and in 16 retail locations in Japan.
His
obsession with tailored clothes dovetails with a deep respect for history.
“Patrick wears what he believes in,” says his Sewing Bee colleague Esme Young.
“When he wears a suit, he is promoting his brand and a certain quintessential
Britishness.”
Grant is
driven by a lament for old British brands he grew up loving but that have been
“ruined” by callous ownership. He bought Norton & Sons with the belief that
heritage had staying power.
“The
overriding zeitgeist was swinging away from mass consumption, mass production,
mass luxury, and back to appreciation of smallness and craftsmanship,” he says.
“I felt there was something incredibly special about this small business that
had only ever done one thing”—recent history notwithstanding—“and done it
extremely well.”
Grant added
another rescue to his portfolio in 2015. Cookson & Clegg, a manufacturer
that started in 1860 and made the British uniforms for World War I,
announced it was going under that February. Two months later, Grant bought
it—and then made a deal to collaborate with Club Monaco, the casual-clothing
retailer owned by Ralph Lauren, on a small collection of military-influenced
trench coats and field jackets due out this month. All the pieces are assembled
at the Cookson & Clegg factory with its typically fanatical devotion to
historical detail.
The
purchase was only natural, Grant says. “This is one of our best suppliers. Once
our customers find a product and like it, I want to keep it exactly the same.”
But then again, he adds, “I’m a sucker for an old-business sob story.”
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