What’s in a pocket?
The style of pocket on your bespoke suit or jacket plays a key role in determining how formal or casual you want to look.
Here comes the sun
Okay so there were hailstones on Berwick St this week, so it’s not quite summer yet, however the time is right to start thinking about commissioning a new suit or jacket for work or a special occasion or even a wedding suit.
The Velvet Jacket
As the days grow colder and shorter and the festive party season awaits, the practical and versatile qualities of a velvet jacket really come into their own. You can wear it dressed down with a t-shirt and jeans for a weekend lunch for example, or dress it up with a...
Recreating the North By Northwest Suit [Documentary]
The North by Northwest suit – as worn by Cary Grant in the 1959 Hitchcock movie of the same name – is probably the most iconic suit in movie history – Esquire voted it number 1 in a top 10 greatest suits poll....
Summer sports jackets
It’s easy in winter to reach for a tweed jacket when you’re heading out for a weekend lunch with friends. However, if, when dressing for the same kind of occasion in summer, a man wants to wear something more interesting and less formal than a navy-blue blazer then...
Seersucker – what you need to know
What is seersucker? It’s a fabric, not a colour pattern, made by ‘puckering’ some of the threads using a slack-tension weave to create a wrinkled effect that keeps the cloth away from the skin, giving it cooling qualities. Where does it come from? The name comes from...
Nick Cave kicking it – GQ’s 50 best dressed men 2018
"In his uniform of bespoke black suit and unbuttoned shirt, a look born from the same gothic imagination as his soul-stirring lyrics, Nick Cave is his own best advert. Ordered mostly from Chris Kerr on Berwick Street, Soho, this is a wardrobe that exceeds in nuance...
I feel the need, the need for tweed
Of late, Tweed has become rather cool - you see everyone from David Gandy to Guy Ritchie wearing it and hit TV shows like Peaky Blinders have lent it a roguish edge. Its commute from aristocratic country wear to the streets of Florence and Soho is well deserved. Tweed...
Morning dress guide for a wedding (or Ascot)
Whether you're getting married, going to a smart wedding or off to Ascot, our comprehensive morning dress guide will ensure you are suitably attired for the occasion. Our morning dress guide starts with possibly the most straight forward choice within the ensemble -...
What is Made To Measure?
Most bespoke tailors offer a made to measure (MTM) option but what is the actual difference between bespoke and MTM? MTM costs significantly less than full bespoke - this much is clear, but are you getting a significantly lesser quality suit if you opt for MTM? Not...
Bespoke wedding suits – a 5 point guide to ordering one
With three quarters of marriage proposals being made over the festive period (according to stag organisers Chilisauce.co.uk ) grooms usually have a bit of planning to do come January. Deciding on a bespoke wedding suit should come close to the top of the planning...
Harris Tweed Jackets
The fashion police is largely a figure of speech, but there is one instance in which it has a literal meaning, and that is the strange case of the hand-made cloth from Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. This is because the use of the name Harris Tweed is restricted, by a 1993...
Bespoke trousers are a very personal choice – here’s why
Bespoke trousers - fit for purpose If the single-best reason for a man to order a bespoke jacket is choice then the primary reason to have a pair of bespoke trousers tailored is fit. While, with some diligent research, a man can find ready-to-wear trousers in most...
What exactly is ‘business casual’? A short guide
At the start of June the number of men across the world required to wear tailored clothes to work shrank considerably when the investment bank JP Morgan revealed its new “business casual” dress code. The rationale is that because JP Morgan’s clients don’t tend to...
What to wear for Henley
Henley-on-Thames the regatta consists of over 200 boat races on the river that runs through the town, with Olympians among the competitors. However, the Regatta is as almost as much a social event as it is a sporting one, and as such the dress code is important (men...
Summer suit ideas
When the temperature rises the prospect of wearing a suit can be forbidding. However, whether you’re going to wear it in the office or at a wedding, in Tooting or in the tropics, there are ways to sport a suit and still beat the heat. A linen suit represents the most...
Recreating Cary Grant’s North By Northwest suit – The Final Part
Part 4 – Picking up the suit It’s rare in life that anything you might buy is created just for you and so it’s a special moment when you pick up a bespoke suit – especially so when you’re a bit of a film buff and it’s a replica of the ‘most iconic suit in cinema’ worn...
Recreating Cary Grant’s North by Northwest Suit: Part 3
Part 3 - The fitting A couple of weeks ago I returned for a fitting at Chris Kerr. Chris’s cut was pretty much spot on first time, taking elements from the original 1959 cut, e.g., a wider trouser, longer jacket and looser fit, whilst retaining a modern, sharper...
Recreating Cary Grant’s North by Northwest suit: Part 2
Part 2 - lapels, cuff buttons, pockets & the cut Now we had the cloth confirmed, there’s just the small matter of trying to match the various components that make up a suit - lapels, cuff buttons, pockets, along with deciding on the cut. While I was committed to...
Recreating Cary Grant’s North By Northwest Suit
Part 1- Finding the cloth The blue/grey plaid suit Cary Grant wears in Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest was recently named the most iconic suit in cinema (by Esquire) - narrowly beating Sean Connery’s grey plaid three piece from Goldfinger. Both of course...
Chris Kerr on dressing Tom Hardy for the film ‘Legend’
The promotional image for new Kray Twins biopic 'Legend', starring Tom Hardy (playing both Ronnie and Reggie), is just about everywhere you look at the moment - posters, magazine covers, online pop ups. So ubiquitous is the advertising that you get a sense of what it...
Bond villains & their suits
Christoph Waltz will play ‘the coolest Bond villain ever’ (according to GQ) in ‘Spectre' due to hit cinemas on November 6th. You can’t see what he’ll be wearing yet - in the teaser trailer, he’s masked in shadow but in the long tradition of Bond villains, a dinner...
Chris Kerr – A Short History
Chris Kerr is the oldest bespoke tailor in Soho, now in its 56th year and third generation of Kerr family involvement. The business was established in 1960 as Len Wilton at 52 Berwick Street, where it remained for 50 years (eventually moving to 31 Berwick Street in...
Style Icon: Jean Gabin
What would it take to capture the heart of one of the most famous and beautiful women of the Twentieth century, the actress Marlene Dietrich? Incomparable wealth, or matinee-idol looks? The French actor Jean Gabin had neither, but he did have what tailoring expert...
Savile Row Tailors vs Soho Tailors
Buying your first (and possibly only) bespoke suit is what marketers call a ‘high consideration’ purchase, meaning that the average male will research the bejesus out of the market before ever stepping foot in one of the many venerable tailors shops this town is...
Black Tie in Midnight Blue
Congratulations to Eddie Redmayne, not only for his Oscar & BAFTA awards but also for sartorial performance at both ceremonies. If there was an award for best dressed recipient of a major film award, we think Eddie should win that too. It’s not easy to digress...
The 39 essential wardrobe items you should buy with a £10K budget
Imagine your house burnt down, and that everything went in the fire (for the sake of keeping this hypothesis pure let’s say that you were out jogging at the time). Even less likely let’s imagine that the insurance company promptly sent you a cheque for £10,000 to...
WARNING: Chris Kerr’s new made-to-measure service could prove highly addictive.
Are you ready to take a step towards the realm of bespoke clothes? Keen for a taste of the world of tailoring, but not yet ready to jump in at the deep end? Then let me tell you about Chris’s new made-to-measure service, which allows men to sample his tailoring at an...
How much does a bespoke suit cost?
For men who’ve never been to a tailor the price can seem intimidating, but in reality the cost is the least interesting thing about a hand-made suit. It’s as relevant to compare the price of a suit made by Chris to the price of a designer suit as it is to compare the...
There are dinner jackets & dinner jackets …
When you order a lounge suit, whether for work or play, or even for a wedding, it’s a relaxing thought that before too long you’ll order another one. Of course you want to get all the details right, but ultimately you can always refine the specification next time...
Why a bespoke Solaro suit?
What do Lapo Elkann, Gianni Agnelli, Matteo Marzotto and Luca di Montezemolo have in common, aside from their incredible wealth and status as style icons? They all wore or wear suits made from Solaro. While a lot of different fabrics are referred to as Solaro only...
Why brown shoes are best
It’s one of the paradoxes of modern life that even though men are freer to dress as they please than they ever have been before there remains a very stubborn wish to adhere to “the rules”. Quite what the rules are, and who came up with them, is unknown, but it remains...
Dressing for spring & summer
With spring approaching any man who wishes to wear a new light-coloured suit this summer needs to get on and place an order. The character of such suits is heavily dependent on the fabric specified, from the dry hand of linen to the fuzz of flannel and the slight...
The cases for braces
Why, you might ask, would anyone wear braces in the 21st century? In an era of slim, flat-front trousers is there still a place for an item of male dress that surely reached its apogee in 1987, when the Michael Douglas film Wall Street was released? The answer is...
Elegance in an Age of Crisis, an exhibition at The Museum at FIT, in New York
This show is about the revolution that took place in the way people dress during the Thirties. While it’s about the clothes worn by men and women here I’m only concerned with the men’s wear. G. Bruce Boyer, surely the English speaking world’s best style journalist,...
Cream dinner jackets
It’s a regrettable truth that if you wear a cream or white dinner jacket someone will accuse you of looking like an Italian ice cream salesman, and that a shiver of fear will run down your spine every time you see someone carrying a glass of red wine. However, if...
Which buttons to do up on your bespoke suit?
The Italian designer Massimo Piombo has strong and fabulous taste. The look book for his Spring-Summer collection is notable because the model is a Japanese aristocrat, the colours are bold, and because the single-breasted jackets are buttoned on the lower of two...
When to order a bespoke suit
I write this in the depths of winter, a day bracketed by frost and chilled by a cold westerly wind. It’s a day when my heaviest tweed jacket is a natural choice, and when it’s hard to imagine the feeling of sunshine on one’s face. Quite naturally the kind of clothes...
What is a dandy?
The recent publication of the book I am Dandy, by Rose Callahan and Nathaniel Adams, has put the idea of dandyism back in the spotlight. While the word is casually thrown around it’s hard to define, especially as it seems to be popularly understood to mean the exact...
Style Icon: George Clooney?
The fact that the actor George Clooney is widely regarded as one of the best-dressed men in the world is preposterous. There are a variety of reasons why Clooney isn’t well dressed: he invariably wears utterly boring dark ready-to-wear clothes, his suits are usually...
Bespoke suits – why less is more
The design commonplace “less is more” has a relevance when it comes to clothes. For a man first overcoming his natural reluctance to draw attention to himself the discovery that it’s possible for a peacock to extend his wings without the sky falling in is an exciting...
The iGent in the grey flannel suit
Warm, fuzzy, soft, comfortable, rumpled, cosy and timeless. It’s no wonder that flannel is now highly sought after by the new generation of ‘iGents’, those men with a passionate interest in relatively clothes who’ve developed their taste and knowledge using blogs and...
Why the seriously stylish wear mohair
If you’re prepared to take part in a style experiment please put on a navy blue jacket, and a pale blue shirt. Now put on a burgundy-coloured satin silk tie, and take a moment to consider the impression this makes. Next, remove the satin-silk tie and replace it with a...
Style Icon: Baron Alexis de Redé
The famous London shoemaker GJ Cleverley offers a beautiful slip-on shoe named after the legendary man of style Baron Alexis de Redé (1922 – 2004). The Baron, a banker and a minor Austrian aristocrat, lead one of the most stylish lives of the second half of the...
Smoking Jackets
For many years the velvet smoking jacket was a garment that seemed to have been sunk by its unfortunate history. Weighed down by associations with the rococo excesses of Seventies tailoring – think Austin Powers wearing a baby-blue ruffle-fronted shirt underneath a...
The covert coat
If a man sets himself apart from the crowd when he first wears a bespoke suit he puts himself in another category entirely when he pulls on a bespoke overcoat. With that single act all the compromises inherent in wearing ready-to-wear coats (the poor cloth, the fit...
The Sports Jacket
Do you regularly shoot pheasants? Spend much time in vast, draughty country houses? Unless the answer to at least one of these questions is yes then you don’t need to dress as if you’re off for a weekend at Downton Abbey. Tweed jackets are traditionally made from...
Dressing for pleasure
For men who love clothes the relentless slide towards casualness is a double-edged sword. If you enjoy dressing up then the fact that society becomes more and more informal can be a source of unhappiness. It’s tempting to become downhearted at the fact that there is...
Wedding Suits part 4: Linen suit
Perhaps the wedding is going to be conducted by the sun-kissed Mediterranean coastline, or perhaps the bride wants to tone down the formality, but whatever the motivation it’s perfectly possible to wear a linen suit in a way that looks cool, rather than colonial. The...
Wedding Suits part 3: Lounge suit
Although this is the easiest dress code with which to comply it’s necessary to sound a note of caution. While most men will already own a lounge suit that could be worn to a wedding, few will own one that should to be worn to a wedding. The reason is that a man,...
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