The tailors Thom Widdett and Luke Sweeney met while working on London’s Savile Row, which has been a global center for bespoke tailoring since the mid-19th century. The pair founded their own label, Thom Sweeney, in 2007, offering ready-to-wear clothes such as traditional suiting staples and more casual pieces like knit polo shirts, as well as bespoke and made-to-measure services. (For the uninitiated, there is a difference: “bespoke” denotes the creation of an entirely new pattern based on its wearer’s measurements and requires multiple fittings, whereas a made-to-measure garment or suit is based on an existing pattern, which is adjusted to its wearer’s specifications.) Now, after opening stores in London, Miami, Los Angeles and New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Thom Sweeney is venturing uptown, where it will be the only Savile Row tailoring house with a presence on Madison Avenue. In addition to the store’s retail and atelier spaces, the new location will open with Sol’s, an in-store bar and lounge named in honor of Luke Sweeney’s father-in-law. To set up shop, the brand’s head cutter, Max Whitaker, will live in New York for the next year, where he’ll work on-site at the Madison flagship, hand-cutting patterns and fitting clients. For him, the process is deeply personal. “I approach it as a conversation before anything else,” he says. “It’s important to understand what the suit is for, but more important is how it will be lived in, how someone moves, how they carry themselves and how they want to feel when they put it on.” Thom Sweeney’s Madison Avenue location will open on June 11, thomsweeney.com.
— Jameson Montgomery
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