I walked into the stylish shop in Mayfair to meet Kathryn Sargent on the first floor of a Georgian house in Brook Street. It had a strong feeling of being both functional yet enticing. I noticed instantly the blend of tradition with the contemporary and I sensed how she exalted her craft with the walnut cabinets placed for the patterns and the hotel foyer desk for the cutting board. All the colours were neutral apart from a shot of the brand’s burgundy and the bright lights, she told me, were a stark contrast to the basements where she had worked.
“The cut of a gentleman’s suit says more about him than almost anything”, she said, and as a tall, confident and naturally well-dressed lady herself, she cuts quite a dash. And she also caused quite a stir by entering “where angels fear to tread” when in 2012 she opened the very first gentleman’s tailoring practice to be owned and managed by a woman in London’s Mayfair: the epicentre of the city's tailoring industry, both very much male bastions.
Kathryn’s passion for tailoring was lit during a trip to London’s Savile Row in 1995, suggested by her tutor. “Instantly, I was bewitched by it. I was twenty years old and as I walked down the street, it felt like I’d stumbled into a secret club. Even then I knew it was a light bulb moment”.
People seemed to her so stylish and well dressed and they reminded her of her father who was to prove the major influence in her career. “My dad was a dapper man. A businessman who travelled often for work, he was always impeccably dressed. He used a tailor for alterations local to us in Leeds and, as a little girl, I’d sit in the shop and watch the men who were busy cross-legged sewing away. But it wasn’t really until I studied fashion that I realised how much of a style icon he was to me”.
“It is imperative,” she insists “that you are passionate about what you do. There is a real opportunity in the world of tailoring for anyone. You just need to grab the opportunity”.
Kathryn certainly grabbed hers. She grew up in Leeds before coming south to enroll on a fashion course at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design in Epsom. It’s where she bought tailoring books with all the tips of the trade and illustrations on how to draft traditional patterns and demonstrate how classic clothing is constructed.
“Bespoke tailoring wasn’t a very fashionable job for a woman back in the 1990s so I didn’t have too much trouble getting a job straight after college. I’m sure many of the senior gentlemen I worked alongside would have preferred a young man as an apprentice but actually they were inundated with women applying. Some found this shocking, some just didn’t understand it, but others thought it was brilliant all the same”. After graduating in 1996, she found work experience at Denman and Goddard, the renowned tailors and shirt makers in Mayfair, before getting full employment at neighbouring Gieves & Hawkes in Savile Row.
“You might as well start at the top and they really did take me under their wing”. Here she put her head down and “practiced and practiced and practiced”. She won the ‘Golden Shears Award’ in 1998 and by 2000 she had become a cutter with her own clients. These two revered houses gave her a proper grounding in menswear and the rigors of bespoke tailoring. It was at the latter that she trained for fifteen years, absorbing decades of knowledge from the craftsmen involving seams, pleats and cuffs. She reached ‘head cutter’ in 2009, an appointment by which she was taken aback with the flurry of letters of support from members of the public that made her understand how unusual a woman was in her position.
She is delighted at the prospect of being an inspiration to other women but is adamant about getting her priorities straight. “I was thrilled to be making history, although for me being a woman is incidental, I am a tailor first and foremost”, she makes clear.
Sargent feels a deep connection between herself and the cloth: “The fabrics themselves are woven in Scotland and Yorkshire. I am from Yorkshire, and I think it must have been in the water.” She loves rich wools that have “substance, depth, colour and texture” and she is adept at creating handcrafted pieces that flatter, inspire and fit beautifully and is keen to make a strong distinction between fashion design and tailoring, believing that the latter is more about craftsmanship and making top quality garments to stand the test of time while the former is more about following trends and so is ever-changing.
Now, as a proud owner of her own atelier, she is very involved at every stage of the tailoring process and she still helps in the cutting of the pattern. She doesn’t have a house style as such preferring her personal touch and styling for the individual. “There’s a real psychology to how people want to feel in their clothes”, she asserts, “looking at how they move: some almost do a workout in their new suit to ensure they are comfortable”.
For her the bespoke tailoring involves the intricate process of making a personalised garment from scratch. She meets the client to discuss their needs, tastes and lifestyle. “Communication is key,” she affirms. Then the measuring begins and it can all take up to fifty hours to make involving up to eight people including a cutter, a trimmer, a coat and trouser maker and a presser.
She has dressed royalty, actors, politicians and leaders of industry and, though her client base is predominantly male, there is a growing horde of women flocking to her shop. “When I was an apprentice I started tailoring garments for myself, slightly softer and less structured than a man’s suit, because it was important to look good. Then clients started asking about tailoring for their wives and now I have a lot of corporate women clients”. She is confident that very soon half her clientele will be women.
She caters to hard-working women needing high performance tailoring to help them look professional and the increase in her female clientele has been significant. With prices on a made-to-measure suit starting at £1,595 and a bespoke two-piece suit at £4,900 that takes some doing. “It’s such a joy for them to have things specially made that suit their character and body shape and, if they are travelling, suit both the climate and culture”.
For her own attire she admits that it is hard to dress casually given she is a tailor. But she loves tailored suits and, now she is a bit older (she says), jackets and trousers. “After all it’s a bit difficult in a dress or skirt to do the job measuring people etc.’
She has already experimented with a ‘seasonal store’, a glorified ‘pop-up shop’, in 2016 in Savile Row. She also flaunts her wares three times a year in American hotels with specially booked sessions. She told me she would love to expand into the whole house but she currently has a small team and is a “tailor not a retailer”. Let’s hope they continue to flock to her atelier and that others follow suit.
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Kathryn Sargent is at 6 Brook St, Mayfair, London W1S 1BB
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Adam Jacot de Boinod worked on the first series of the BBC panel game show QI for Stephen Fry. He is a British author and travel writer.
