< PreviousHistory and modernity combined: the inspiration for the collaborative collection between Canali and Chinese label 8ON8 has called upon Marco Polo’s travels along the Silk Road, as well as the Italian marque’s Cafra Cat, to create a unique line of clothes that ranges from outerwear to accessories. GET TY IMAGES 38 TRME_36-39_Unstitched Canali Cafra Cat_11914742.indd 3830/12/2021 01:24:15 PM39 UNSTITCHED TRME_36-39_Unstitched Canali Cafra Cat_11914742.indd 3930/12/2021 01:24:21 PMUNSTITCHED TRME_40-43_Unstitched Cromford Leather_11914739.indd 4030/12/2021 01:26:43 PMFor those of us who regard leather, suede and shearling as highly as Merino wool, Cromford Leather Company — this year celebrating 50 years of excellence — is a hallowed moniker. UNDER THE SKIN by nick scott 41 TRME_40-43_Unstitched Cromford Leather_11914739.indd 4130/12/2021 01:26:49 PM42 Far be it from us to disparage the hallowed craft that has always sat at the centre of our editorial focus, but wool fabric is an extremely forgiving friend to the bespoke tailor. Thanks to millions of years of evolution, as well as the diligence and perspicacity of the world’s best sheep farmers and cloth makers, it has unmatched stretch, pliability and crease recovery. Even the finest, thinnest, minuscule-micron batches of warp- and-weft twine behave with dutiful subservience. Now imagine carrying out similar tasks to the conventional tailor’s but with the bulkier, denser, fibrously inconsistent material that is animal hide: it’s an image that calls to mind the trickiness that porcelain poses to the ceramicist over coarse-grain clay. “You’ve got one shot at it when you make a leather jacket,” says Pauline Harris, the owner of Cromford Leather, a London specialist (in suede, shearling and sheepskin as well as leather) that offers bespoke and made-to-measure garments as well as a repertoire of ready-to-wear items available on The Rake’s website. “When it comes to cutting and stitching, any mistakes and you’ve had it,” she adds. “You can take in a leather garment a bit, but out? No chance. And sheepskin’s a different beast altogether to leather. It’s nothing like it, apart from the skin sizes. The wool on one side means it reacts to what you’re doing entirely differently. So what we do for our customers is that we make a trial version in cloth, and we fit that on the customer, and when we’ve got that correct we make it up in leather or sheepskin.” Another glaring difference posed by animal pelt is the limitations posed by the size of skins. “A lambskin is, maximum, three feet by two feet — so coat designs have to take that into account,” says Sarah Brown, Pauline’s Business Manager. “Bearing in mind there has to be seams, too, what Pauline achieves is incredible.” Cromford Leather celebrate their 50th anniversary this year, having been founded in 1971 by the Savile Row tailor Alan Sprooles and his architect friend Peter Goodall, who started out selling suede trousers advertised in the back of The Sunday Times before setting up shop on Wardour Street. Unbeknown to Sprooles and Goodall, their company’s long-term future was literally in the making around this time a couple of hundred miles to the north, where a 14-year-old Harris was spending her youth at the sartorial behest of the most explosive counter-cultural youth movement in history. “Punk was all about making things up — you didn’t buy new clothes, you bought second-hand, and I used to just cut up old leather jackets,” Harris says. “I’d take a trenchcoat and make a short jacket and then another top with the rest of it. Anything went in the punk days — it was so liberating.” By 17, Harris was serving an apprenticeship in a workshop on Division Street in Sheffield; she then spent a decade abroad, in South Africa and New Zealand, where she resumed her work in leather tailoring under the tutelage of a Maori by the name of Ruby — “a beautiful sewer” who “ran the workroom, walking around with a cigarette holder in hand, wearing slippers and a tabard apron”, Harris says. When she returned home and started work with Sprooles and Goodall (whose company, by then based at 56 Chiltern Street, bore the rather prosaic name of The General Leather Company), one of her first tasks was to make an alteration to one of their more illustrious commissions: a red suede coat belonging to the Queen. Clockwise from top left: the Cromford store on Chiltern Street in London; an original advert from the brand’s archives; Pauline Harris, the Director and chief leather jacket tailor, at work on a bomber jacket; locking the leather and shearling together; and Harris on the shop fl oor. TRME_40-43_Unstitched Cromford Leather_11914739.indd 4230/12/2021 01:26:54 PM43 UNSTITCHED Harris took over the company after 20 years’ service when the founders retired, changing the name as a nod both to the Derbyshire town often considered the birthplace of the industrial revolution and, more broadly, British craft and heritage. As if in deference to that in-at-the-deep-end task for Her Majesty two decades previously, the commissions from notables soon started rolling in, but this time from showbiz royalty. Already on the company résumé are Pierce Brosnan’s nubuck jacket for Die Another Day; Brad Pitt’s tan suede 1940s-style piece in silky lambskin for the WWII thriller Allied; and a key piece from Mick Jagger’s wardrobe for the Voodoo Lounge tour. While Cromford Leather work their magic for both genders, keen-eyed viewers may have noticed a pattern when it comes to their celebrity work. “I prefer dressing men to women,” says Harris. “Women shop differently to men — men invest in a piece and do their research. They look at the quality of it, the fit, the leather. And the last of these is crucial — what determines the jacket is the leather. What we want is for buyers to really want and love the jackets we make and see them as jackets for life, and when it comes to that the leather itself dictates everything.” Indeed, it is not only leather’s molecular structure — as durable and delectable to the garment owner as it is confounding and fickle to the garment maker — that makes it a tricky material to work with; it’s also becoming increasingly elusive. “I went to the Lineapelle leather fair in Milan in February,” says Harris. “Every tanner in the world is there, and yet I only found two skins that I was happy with. They sometimes apply too much treatment to it, whereas all I want is a nice piece of brown leather that feels good.” Perfectionism is at the heart of Cromford Leather’s approach. Brown says that, “Pauline often sends customers away to go and sleep on it and do their homework, because she wants the clothes to be investment pieces and no hasty decisions should be made”, and adds that the ‘slow fashion’ concept is the company’s heart and soul. Completing a brand philosophy that finds such eloquent expression in Harris’s output are her regular flashes of unique inspiration, a case in point being the brown Douglas shearling flight jacket made using a special technique devised by Pauline. “When it comes to the original flight jackets made from sheepskin, the outer side is now, 50 years on, cracking up,” says Brown. “So what Pauline does is mount a really sturdy cowhide onto the outer side of the sheepskin, so that it’s very heavyweight and almost indestructible.” The bedrock underlying all of this philosophy, though, is the notion that achievement is a creative, rather than a commercial, goal. “Success, for me, isn’t about having three shops and making a lot of money — one successful shop is good enough for me,” says Harris. “No, it’s about being able to say no to things which, creatively, I’d rather not do.” “Women shop differently to men — men invest in a piece, do their research. They look at the quality, the leather.” Pierce Brosnan in a Cromford jacket in Die Another Day; and a campaign image exhibiting the brand’s mastery of leather and suede. TRME_40-43_Unstitched Cromford Leather_11914739.indd 4330/12/2021 01:27:02 PMMARK LANGRIDGE TRME_44-47_Unstitched Wolf_11914745.indd 4430/12/2021 01:27:42 PMEvery valuable accessory or heirloom needs a container for safekeeping. No, your sock drawer will no longer do — think more like luxury cases with Bluetooth-enabled locks. This is where the family-run specialists Wolf 1834 come in… BOX CLEVER by josh sims UNSTITCHED I’m a bit obsessive about six-sided boxes,” says Simon Wolf. “It’s very hard to provide them with interest to the eye. And that’s essential, because we hope they’ll be around for a long time.”Wolf is the fifth generation to run the company that gave him his surname, even if his mother insisted that — unlike the previous four generations, dating to the founding of the company in 1834 — he would not be named Philip. Back then, in Germany, the first Philip Wolf had spotted an untapped human proclivity and catered for it. “Why does anyone need a nice garage for their car, or shoe bags for their footwear?” asks Wolf (full name: Simon Philip Wolf V) today. “It’s because if something is of value to us, maybe of sentimental value alone, people want a special place for it. It’s respectful towards the object. And it’s a heavy responsibility for us to offer that protection for people’s legacies, either what’s been handed down to them or what they intend to hand down to others.” Indeed, what started out as marketing — Philip Wolf No.1 noted that he could charge more for the silver pieces he made if they were presented in an attractive box — grew into an unusual specialism. And one that, perhaps unexpectedly, became notably technical. Sure, you can have a simple valet tray in which to dump your keys — Wolf, in fact, made the drinks coasters for Concorde, for example. And it was in a rather lovely, simple little box that Margaret Thatcher presented a pair of silver cufflinks to Ronald Reagan as a sign of that special relationship. Yet it was also Wolf that invented not only the jewellery box with a twirling, musical ballerina but subtle design benefits such as LusterLoc (a fabric lining that absorbs the gases known to tarnish jewellery) or spring-loaded hinges that, while long out of patent, are still widely used in watch presentation boxes. (In Wolf’s grandfather’s time, the company made the packaging for many of the big-name watch brands, back when they remained independent.) More recently, you can protect your personal objet in a box with a Bluetooth-enabled lock. “We introduced the guard on a watch-roll to separate the watches, too, which seems so very obvious, but which nobody, it seems, had thought to do before,” says Wolf, who clearly thinks a lot about how we might store our small accessories. “Anything used to store something precious needs to look good, and that’s a matter of taste — the proportions, the balance. But it also has to be practical. A box is a box, unless it does something for you.” When Wolf joined the family firm, aged 18, almost 40 years ago, he knew he faced the challenge of leaving his own mark. People were starting to travel more, so there was a growing demand for compact, functional, attractive means of packing one’s bling, or, in the case of men, a selection of watches — “and even when people can only dream of travel, they like to buy whatever facilitates that dream,” Wolf notes. But, he realised, there was another gap in the market that he couldn’t quite believe hadn’t been cornered. Hence the creation of the only watch-winder — a device that keeps your watch movement moving when you’re not wearing it — to count its revolutions. “Watch-winders then still amounted to a cottage industry, the products made by people who just loved their watches,” Wolf says. “But every watch brand has long released information regarding how many turns their watch models should ideally be given [to keep it optimally wound] each day. They thought it was important enough to tell their consumers, but nobody had responded to meet the need that followed.” Certainly, a Wolf watch-winder keeps your automatic watches active, or inactive — “rest cycles to allow the pressure to release,” as Simon Wolf puts it — so they can be fully exercised without ever losing all of the energy generated by their movement. This, naturally, keeps the movement in better condition than if you were to leave it dormant for a long period. But it’s also a relatively new idea to many — and, curiously, especially to those older gentlemen who are now too inactive and need a watch-winder to take up the slack. “It’s not particularly good to leave a watch lying unwound in your sock draw, but of course that’s where millions of watches 45 “If something is of value to us, maybe of sentimental value alone, people want a special place for it.” TRME_44-47_Unstitched Wolf_11914745.indd 4530/12/2021 01:27:48 PM46 UNSTITCHEDUNSTITCHED Clockwise from top: a factory delivery in 1960; making the stitching perforations; and one of Wolf’s skilled craftsmen cuts the leather to size. TRME_44-47_Unstitched Wolf_11914745.indd 4630/12/2021 01:27:55 PM47 are often found,” says Wolf. “It’s remarkable, the number of people into watches who don’t know about watch-winders. But I think that’s changing. As interest in watches grows, we’ve already learned to keep the original packaging, the papers and so on, if we see that watch as an investment. But now we’re learning more about the upkeep of our watches as well. I think this is really the start of a new industry [of watch care].” It’s progress like that — however small or rarefied — that gets Simon Wolf excited. That’s just as well for a man who always wanted to be a farmer but whose father, as Wolf puts it, “laid a few breadcrumbs to see if the interest in joining the company was there, and ended up becoming my mentor in business”. Although Wolf may be celebrating their 190th birthday in three years’ time — marking the occasion with a few re-issues of some of their more time-honoured designs — that cornering of a fledgling if potentially huge market (even maybe Simon’s very name) might mark a new era for the company. “Family businesses, especially one that’s lasted over generations, have a friendship, a camaraderie to them, but they can actually be more difficult to manage precisely because you’re so emotionally attached to it. It makes business personal,” Wolf says. “That’s why, while my kids have all worked with me at times, I don’t ever talk to them about coming into the company. They’ve followed their own road. So will I be the last of the Wolf line [in the firm]? You never know. But the thing is that the company won’t end with me. People will always want to look after those things that mean something to them.” Forged in steel with nine bidirectional steel bolts and a Sargent & Greenleaf electronic keypad, wrapped in top-grain cowhide leather and encased in exquisite rare woods or leather panelling, this is a magnifi cent safe in British racing green. Open the door and a soft light unveils the array of Bluetooth-controlled watch-winders that count precisely the turns per day using Wolf’s patented algorithms. There are additional drawers for every kind of valuable. TRME_44-47_Unstitched Wolf_11914745.indd 4730/12/2021 01:28:02 PMNext >