Savile Row

Wednesday

Nigel Havers

London e-bike blight

The past few weeks have been spent in the enclosed rehearsal spaces of the Ambassadors Theatre in London’s West End, preparing and finally opening in Private Lives. Shut off from the world as I am, we could have become a colony of North Korea for all I know. And yet some things do penetrate – who could fail to be horrified and appalled by the twin disasters in North Africa recently? These two devastating events have resulted in the deaths of an ever-rising number of tens of thousands of people. And yet they already seem to have dropped off our news coverage. Has the enormity of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami made the western world immune to such disasters? How can the latest news from the Strictly studio occupy more space in news outlets than Morocco or Libya? Madness.

Tuesday

Ross Anderson

The sartorial splendor of King Charles III

From our US edition

Much ink has been spilled over the clothes in Netflix’s fifth season of The Crown, which debuted last week. The award-winning show about Britain’s royal family has reached the scandalous “Diana Affair,” in which every outfit of Ms. Spencer's is seen as a rapier against the formal codes of the Firm. Her looks are meticulously replicated by costume designer Amy Roberts (or as much as possible given the slimmer, taller frame of Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Diana). Despite their spousal difficulties, a talent Diana and Charles shared was dressing. His attention to playfully using fundamentals (color, cut, textile quality) lends to a personal style that is both timeless and surprisingly contemporary.

Thursday

Dominic Green

You didn’t have to be mad to work for Tommy Nutter — but it helped

The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in the faith that style makes content. This, not the question of which way you dress, is the secret compact between tailor and client. ‘Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of clothes wisely and well, so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress,’ Carlyle wrote of the dandy in Sartor Resartus. Tommy Nutter was one of Tommy Carlyle’s dandies, a ‘clothes-wearing man’ and a ‘poet of the cloth’. From 1969 to 1976, Nutter bestrode the world of tailoring like a Narcissus. Though he could barely manage a backstitch, his designs rewrote the book on male style.