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said, when he appeared in a BBC documentary, “at one time, we had a problem—we had too much work and we took a salesman on to stop the customers from coming in.”
    Things, however, were changing. Mass production of apparel, which gathered steam after World War I, continued its growth. A man who wanted a decent suit no longer had to pay a tailor a visit. The Old Guard was aghast. An article on the front page of a monthly leaflet produced by the cloth merchant Dormeuil in1927 stated the objections succinctly: “He who wishes to be dressed, in the real meaning of the term, must have clothes designed and wrought for him. Nature made individuals; bespoke tailoring assists in retaining individuality. The choice is clear. One may live and die a man. Or, with personality destroyed, the epitaph shall read: He was born a man; he died a 36 regular.”
    But there was no going back. As mass production ramped up, a shift in style also pulled men away from the sturdy English Cut (and Ivy style, its baggy American fraternity brother) to Italy’s new, slinky Continental Look, first made famous by the Romebased Brioni. A 1955
Life
magazine article called the appearance in American department stores of Brioni’s slim-cut styles “a trap for men” aimed at “outmoding their wardrobes.”
    Italy became even more dominant in the late seventies and eighties, when Giorgio Armani’s fluid, easy-to-toss-on, unstructured jackets were adopted by Hollywood’s chin-stubbled elite.The Armani look also bridged “the gap between the anti-Establishment sixties and the money-gathering eighties. It made the wearer seem simultaneously more at ease and more powerful,” as Woody Hochswender observed in a 1990
New York Times
piece about the Italian icon. The Armani suit, he said, was just “right for a new generation of men slipping back into the office routine after a decade of countercultural copping out.”
    From the informal ease of Armani, it wasn’t a huge leap to Casual Friday, which by the late nineties had created a generation of otherwise intelligent men who believed that dressing well meant putting on a clean pair of Dockers.It didn’t help that the era’s tech tycoons were sartorial duds: Bill Gates was most often seen wearing what
GQ
called the “lazy preppy” look, while the late Steve Jobs made a uniform of Levi’s 501 jeans and black IsseyMiyake-designed mock turtlenecks. (Who could have predicted that they would look like Gordon Gekko compared with the world’s next digital mogul, Mark Zuckerberg—he of the ubiquitous hoodie?) Personal computers, meanwhile, made it possible to work at home, where there was no reason to ever get out of one’s pajamas, let alone put on a coat and tie.
    Back in the West End, the tailors were further rattled by the arrival of two young fashion-forward, image-conscious upstarts—Richard James in 1992 and Ozwald Boateng in 1995. Both broke the unwritten codes of Row decorum by cultivating famous clients and seeking out publicity (James ran advertisements in glossy menswear magazines; Boateng staged a catwalk show of his ready-to-wear collection at Paris Fashion Week). Like Tommy Nutter before them, their interpretations of classic English tailoring were presented in jarring color palettes and quirky silhouettes. While the old schoolers were fretting about the young arrivals, they were also surveying their own workrooms and seeing a sea of gray hair. The few younger workers they did have were unlikely to stay more than a year or two. Most were more interested in being famous designers than in being anonymous “makers”—and were unwilling to put in the years it would take to become expert trouser or coat makers. As for the tailors, who could afford to pay a trainee that long, anyway?
    Then there was the infuriating hijacking of the term “bespoke.” Tailors felt that it was
their
word, and suddenly it was popping up to describe everything from insurance to ice cream. Even worse were the