The Tailor and Cutter remembered by Eric Musgrave-Textile Ads

Author of Sharp Suits and the former editorial director of Drapers, Mr Musgrave is a writer and commentator on menswear, textiles and fashion retailing. This is the fifth in a series of 12 contributions featuring the fascinating finds of The Tailor & Cutter.

Feel the width

Not that long ago, there were so many bespoke tailors across the UK that cloth suppliers needed to advertise extensively to reach these potential customers. The weekly issue of The Tailor & Cutter provided the ideal marketing platform for mills and cloth merchants. Their advertisements even from more than 80 years ago exhibit sophisticated marketing messages and impressive execution.

This short series from cloth merchant Grainger & Smith in 1936 urges tailors to stock full bolts of cloth, not just the usual “bunches”, or books of small cloth samples.

From The Tailor & Cutter 28 February 1936

The message is it will be easier to sell a suit to a customer if he can see and appreciate a full length of cloth, rather than just a 6-inch x 4-inch cutting (NB please check the measurement of a bunches book!).

From The Tailor & Cutter 20 March 1936

From The Tailor & Cutter 3 April 1936

Obviously, G&S will also have benefited if tailors had shelves full of rolls of cloth in their workrooms! Note that they were offering one-day delivery on orders – and that’s about half a century before Amazon Prime. (It is believed Grainger & Smith ceased trading about 20 years ago).

In the early post-WW2 era, premium cloth supplier Wain Shiell used a similar approach, but graduated to high-quality photography rather than line drawings or cartoons.

From The Tailor & Cutter 14 May 1948

From The Tailor & Cutter 2 July 1948

Its slogan “Wherever good clothes are made by hand ” both put an emphasis on the craft element of the tailoring trade and also suggested to tailors that if they didn’t offer Wain Shiell clothes, perhaps their clothes were not “good”. The term “Materials for men” is well chosen too, Traditionally, men’s tailoring used “cloth”. Conversely, the term “fabric” was used for womenswear such as dresses and blouses.

From The Tailor & Cutter 3 September 1948

Wain Shiell’s sequence of charming images – I have at least six different ones in my T&C archive from 1948 – underline the handwork that went into a fine bespoke garment then. A similar sequence could easily be run by Stewart Christie today to promote its own craft credentials. (Wain Shiell is now owned by Scabal, the Brussels-based cloth merchant that operates a fine cloth mill in West Yorkshire).

The most celebrated advertiser in the ranks of the tailoring cloth suppliers is the Anglo-French concern Dormeuil. In my history of tailoring Sharp Suits (Pavilion Books, 2009 and 2013) I devoted four pages to the marketing images from this creative cloth merchant, which had started using memorable advertisements as far back as the 1920s.

From The Tailor & Cutter 10 February 1961

This campaign from the spring of 1961 promotes the versatility of Dormeuil’s collection of cloths called Sportex, which included worsteds for the town and tweeds for the country.

Sadly, the name of the fabulous illustrator has not been recorded, but he (or she) packs a hell of a lot of beautiful detail in these small spaces.

From The Tailor & Cutter 24 February 1961

“Courting and escorting…” in town. “Squiring and enquiring…” in the country. The copywriter(s) need to be saluted too. This is brilliant stuff and so well pitched at the target audience. Like the Wain Shiell ads, these could easily have been used in consumer magazines as well as a trade paper like The Tailor & Cutter.

From The Tailor & Cutter 28 April 1961