FROM SAVILE ROW

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 84, 5 October 1940, Page 17

FROM SAVILE ROW

SUITS CROSSING ATLANTIC

AMERICANS GROW STOUTER

One thousand suits from London's Savile Row are crossing the Atlantic every month in spite of the war. writes an overseas observer.

Most of them are going to Americans who used to come to England once a year. Their measurements, mailed to London with their order, vary very slightly. Americans, Savile Row reports, are growing rather stouter. In fact the only losses of weight noted since war began are in officers back from Dunkirk. Many of them have lost a stone.

After paying duty, each suit costs its American wearer between £20 and £30. The wearer usually leaves the choice of material to his London tailor; and one of them orders as many as twenty suits at a time.

Smart Argentine men are also following London fashions and a wealthy citizen of Buenos Aires has increased the export of English suits and shoes to the Argentine by suggesting to his London tailor that, for every Argentine patron who visited England, there were twenty Argentines who would buy suits and shoes from Mayfair if Mayfair would come to them.

So today the well-dressed Argentine has the new season patterns sent to him with minute measurement directions, and in this way the best London tailors are dressing Buenos Aires in suits of English cut. There is only one difference; the Argentine prefers silk linings.

Similarly one famous London shoemaker is sending two of his skilled workers to U.S.A. and South America to create wooden models of his clients' feet from which in Mayfair they now build on each personal last shoes and boots that are scientifically exact.