Showing the tailoring details used in a Benson & Clegg jacket that have to be adjusted for the female form.

DOES Savile Row cater for the fairer sex? It’s a question often asked and which we answer with caution.

Savile Row has always been and essentially still is a bastion of masculinity - despite a number of female trainees now being admitted to the workrooms.  But most tailors will make also for ladies, notably  Dege & Skinner, especially classic country styles for country clients, and Maurice Sedwell, where Andrew Ramroop produces some fashionable designs.  Now Benson & Clegg has joined them.
 
This firm, situated across Piccadilly in the Piccadilly Arcade, has created some classic but stylish women’s jackets, starting first of all with a slightly longer line, now cropping to a more fashionably shorter cut.  Slim fitting and single breasted, they retain the softly tailored but properly lined and formed make of a Savile Row style, the latest made in a wonderfully soft Zegna cloth and a pale check Holland & Sherry.  They have been well received.

Yet despite director Ken Austin also being pleased with the results he doesn’t think that women’s wear is likely to take up too much of the firm’s  production for the future. 

“We know what we are doing with all sorts of male figures,” he told us, “but the ladies… well, they’re different, aren’t they?”

And there you have it.  In our experience, dating back to the famous old Tailor & Cutter Exhibition, ladies jackets produced by a Row house tend to have a more rounded, shaped bust, reflecting shaping applied to a man’s jacket.  Fine for those fuller figures who have such a bosom but not so good for slimmer versions looking for a pert bust  line.
So for those ladies keen to experience Savile Row tailoring, it is something to watch out for at the fitting stage.