Bespoke tailors
Savile Row · Est. 1921
The house / Savile Row, since 1921
The name on the door. The scar on the table. Dot by the back window.
When you come downstairs, these are the things you’ll find.
The names on the door
Arthur Pellow opened the house in 1921, after cutting for other houses on the Row. Edmund Vane was his partner, and the better salesman.
Vane died in 1962. His name stayed because Arthur said the sign would look lopsided without him.
Ruth is Arthur’s granddaughter and the third Pellow to hold the shears. They are still her grandfather’s shears, sharpened by the same family firm in Sheffield. She has worked at the same table for thirty-six years.
Painted on the cellar door
Measure twice. Cut once.
Measure again on Tuesday.People change shape over a weekend.
The people you’ll meet
Owner & head cutter · Third generation
Ruth is 58, left-handed and quite clear about how things should be cut. Every pattern in the cellar since 1988 is chalked from the “wrong” side. Apprentices learn to read them backwards.
She does not do email. If you ring while she’s not cutting, you’ll speak to her.
“I don’t make clothes. I make a record of a person, in cloth, at one moment in their life. Then I spend three fittings arguing with it.”
Apprentice cutter · Fourth year
Kofi is 26 and grew up in Peckham. He came from a fashion degree and “had to unlearn everything that made clothes look good in photographs”. He now cuts trousers on his own.
Ruth says he has “the best eye for a sleeve I’ve seen in thirty years, and I’m not telling him that”.
Coatmaker · Forty-four years here
Dot is 71. She has sewn our jackets for forty-four years and can tell which coatmaker made a jacket by the buttonholes.
Her bench is by the back window. The light is better there. She is not moving it for anyone.
A very old Border terrier. Usually under the cutting table. Not for sale.
The things we keep
Oak, 1921. A piece of window glass landed on it during the Blitz in 1940 and left a long pale scar. Arthur refused to have it planed out.
Ruth still cuts over it. The table has work to do.
The cellar holds a brown paper pattern for every customer since 1921. About eleven thousand of them hang on hooks in rows, each labelled in pencil.
If you come back after twenty years, Ruth starts with your old pattern, “plus whatever the twenty years added”. You don’t disappear from the house when you leave it.
Coming back? Ring Ruth
The ledgers / Remarks, 1936
“Customer insists on turn-ups. Told him. He insists.”
Every order since 1921 is written by hand, with a line for remarks. Some remarks need very little explaining.
One jazz trumpeter needed room across his back to breathe on the high notes. Ruth cut the back while he played. His is the only suit recorded as “measured during a solo”.
A small house assumption
Every Pellow & Vane jacket has a hidden inside pocket sized for a paperback. It has been there since 1921.
Nobody has ever been asked if they wanted it.
One thing you won’t find here
Names of people you would recognise. We’ve made their suits. We’ve never said who. “If you want to know who else wears us, you’re asking the wrong tailor.”