AS CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF KILGOUR, ONE OF TAILORING’S MOST RESPECTED INSTITUTIONS, CARLO BRANDELLI HAS BREATHED NEW LIFE INTO ‘THE ROW’ words: josh sims photographs: nick knight IT MUST BE the Italian in him. Few men could be so particular about the clothes they wear and, in Carlo Brandelli’s case, design. Here, after all, is a man who insists that men should don no other pattern than stripes and spots; who says that men should not wear bright colours; and who considers it “fundamental” that one’s socks match one’s trousers. He is just as particular about everything else: that his coffee be Veluto Nero ground in a particular London coffee store, for example. “That particularity is in the genes,” says the designer who won British Menswear Guild’s Menswear Designer of the Year for 2005. “Understanding beauty and design comes from my Italian roots: that appreciation for la bella figura. You can see a car, house, clothes, even a dish, and just know it’s correct. I try to find that beauty in anything. I don’t have to have things perfect, just as long as the spirit is right. We can’t all be blessed with doing what we want to do, but you can still do things to your best ability. That’s very Italian too.” What is more, he is an Italian on Savile Row. Known fondly as The Row, it’s the home of the English bespoke tailoring tradition, more beloved though by foreign visitors than the natives. And, as the creative director of Kilgour – previously Kilgour, French & Stanbury – and one of tailoring’s most respected institutions, Brandelli has been making changes. These are changes that The Row has only recently acknowledged as necessary for survival in the contemporary brandscape, not to mention in the face of rising rents, improving ready-to-wear and a difficulty in recruiting trainee tailors. “Savile Row is a fantastic part of the country’s heritage and I’ll fight for its survival as much as the next person. But the spirit of Savile Row isn’t right at the moment. From the outside it’s all elegance; from the inside, there’s a lot of infighting. It’s like a soap opera,” suggests Brandelli, with the kind of comment destined to win him few friends. “There’s a culture of exciting street fashion and product design in Britain but its craft in fashion – its shoes, cashmere, tailoring – just doesn’t want to move forward. They think the customers want them to stay the same. They don’t. They just want the quality to stay the same.” The 37-year-old, however, has avanti in his blood. He has, for instance, given Kilgour’s image, from shop to product, logo to advertising, an overhaul. He has introduced ready-to-wear to make the lean, structured shoulders and slim line of Kilgour’s much-admired single-button suits accessible to more, while upgrading its famed bespoke service – the one beloved of stars from Cary Grant in North by North West to Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. Now a new generation of young (and less young) bucks, from Jude Law to Bryan Ferry, Hugh Grant and the latest James Bond, Daniel Craig, have taken up the cause. In short, what Brandelli has done in the eight years he has been with the company (and as part-owner following a management buy-out in 2003) is to pull off the trick of changing it just enough to be interesting but not so much as to lose its heritage. This has won him the aforementioned award. It’s also seen Kilgour’s sales increase last year by an incredible 900 per cent on 2004. And it has given men dedicated to dapper dressing the beginnings of a truly British luxury brand. When tailors T and F French and AH Kilgour joined forces with Hungarians Fred and Louis Stanbury in 1924, the immigrants’ new and revolutionary cut overturned the Savile Row apple cart. Might Signor Brandelli do the same now? He is certainly aiming high and far. He intends Kilgour to have “historical significance”, explaining that: “To resonate through time is the only accolade that makes any sense. I’m not interested in the moment and hanging out with C-list celebrities in order to push the brand.” He has also won a reputation for having an ego in good health. “Ego comes down to a difference between west and east,” says Brandelli, who studied fighting and meditative martial arts until his late 20s, practising for four to six hours a day. “In western society, ego is seen as being all about bravado, as a negative. But ‘ego’ can be used in a soft way: having a fresh perspective on something is about learning to listen to your instinct. That instinct is your ego talking. And to design is to decide, so understanding your ego is important.” To give classicism a gentle update, perhaps? “All the work is on the inside, but it creates something beautiful on the outside,” says Brandelli, with a hint of Confucius. It was perhaps something he was born to. Show the boy and you see the man, and GQ’s Most Stylish Man of 2005 at that. As a boy, he would, of his own accord, always change his clothes after playing outside. While sat in L’Ecu de France, the posh West End restaurant overseen by his father, and being cooed over by the Joan Collins set, young Brandelli would no doubt be mortified should a dollop of sauce not find its way from fork to mouth without stopping off on his shirt. Here, after all, was a man who became a menswear buyer and then in 1993 launched, just off Savile Row, a pioneering London store called Squire. With its prescient blending of art and fashion, it would come to define the modish Britpop style. Brandelli signed a major deal for global expansion… and then, in 1997, it all fell apart. Within a few months he was consulting to Kilgour and trying to get his ordered world back together. The experience left him less than enamoured with the fashion industry. “Squire was an experiment, with 100 per cent importance attached to the aesthetic, which is not far from what we do at Kilgour,” states Brandelli. “It became very fashionable and courted all the right people – but getting that isn’t all that difficult. But I got tired of high fashion. It became all fluff. A lot of designers spend their entire working lives defending fluff. But I couldn’t do it. When I folded it, some people got in touch to find out why – but it was just over, that’s all. It was a perfect example of how the industry works. It prompted me to return to something with craft and heritage, with sound design principles too.” In a world that likes to live in the reflected glare of flash-bulbs at flash parties, such principles may be hard to identify for any other than the discerning. Big brand logos, hip names with, in an accelerated culture, their five minutes of fame, all things bling and brash – into such a scene must fit a sense of style that is more consistent and self-confident, which whispers rather than hollers. This is the space in which Brandelli must do his conjuring. “I don’t make fundamental changes, but aim for a constant, for an elegant sense of nothingness,” says Brandelli, echoing Beau Brummel’s advice that a man who draws attention to himself through his dress is not well dressed at all. “Style, and Kilgour, is not about being a peacock. In fact, I don’t even like the word ‘fashion’ any more. There’s a real spirit of individuality that has come through over the past 10 years – and that’s what makes bespoke so interesting, because fashion can’t offer that. So much of fashion is vacuous. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I like to think that I don’t work in ‘fashion’ at all.”