A Night Out in Mayfair
The Quailor’s Pride Party – Finally finding my community under needle and thread.
As Pride began, in a quiet corner of Mayfair, the Quailors kicked off their annual celebrations.
Savile Row, the heart of British tailoring for over 300 years, with its stucco-fronted former townhouses and royal customers, is an unlikely location for a grassroots LGBTQIA+ association.
Traveling through London to Savile Row, the once loud and hectic Friday night streets lulled to the polite quietness of black cabs, clicking heels and closing shop fronts. There was a peculiar stillness in the air as I wandered past the gold-plated cars of Berkeley Square and over the hill on Conduit Street, where golden hour aptly lit up the world’s oldest bespoke tailoring shops in the rich hues of a summer evening.
I was on my way to Quailors, a union founded in 2020 for LGBTQIA+ tailors, trouser makers, independent coatmakers and their allies. The group came to be following a discussion by the group’s founders, Andrew Johnson and James MacAuslan, both in their mid-thirties, trying to create an inclusive space for LGBTQIA+ people within the tailoring industry. A year later, they were able to host their first drinks event to two dozen people in the aftermath of the pandemic, and have now grown to over 95 members. Tonight’s annual Pride Party was to attract over 300 like-minded individuals.
Approaching the event, I must confess to some conflicting feelings. I am bisexual and have loved the tailoring industry since I became aware of fashion. Having attended a school with no one publicly out; I have always felt a subconscious suppression of my sexuality. I had also been someone who had felt almost no connection to ‘Pride’ in virtue of not finding my queer space within it.
Tailoring has always had a highly traditional streak – in many ways, that’s part of the appeal. But this traditionalism has, in the past, made it a very unaccepting corner of the fashion world.
Speaking with Andrew, he recalled how in his first few weeks as a Tailoring intern he was told, “we don’t teach poofy here”. This outright homophobia was not an isolated incident for new tailors entering the Row in the early noughties, and there was an obvious need for modernisation in these fusty workplaces.
Arriving at The Deck, Savile Row’s first women’s-only bespoke tailor, I was struck immediately by the sartorial superiority of everyone in the room; beautiful burgundy linen suits standing amongst expertly cut leather jackets. At once I was surrounded by those who shared my admiration for the world of bespoke fashion and felt immediately at ease. The evening attracted a huge range of people. There were students who had begun their first-year tailoring course at The Savile Row Academy mixing with titans of the Row, such as Anda Rowland, director of Anderson and Shepherd and Campbell Carey, Creative Director at Huntsman.
Others in the group were from all sorts of interesting occupations: Rob collected antique
porcelain; Tom was an international classical pianist who had just come back from touring in Vienna; Zac dressed exclusively in historically accurate Georgian clothing and held a yearly regency ball at Brighton Pavilion celebrating antiquated clothing.
It is an overwhelmingly reassuring experience to find oneself surrounded by those with whom you are so similar. Whilst there are infinite benefits to diversity across society – to experience queer identity is to feel different through one’s adolescence, and so to find yourselves amongst those who have experienced the same, is a unique feeling of safety and inclusion. I hope you have experienced something similar yourself.
