Trailblazing Tailoring

After grabbing headlines as the first woman to wear a top hat and tails to Royal Ascot, Daisy Knatchbull is making a name for herself as the first female tailor to have her own shopfront on Savile Row

Here’s something you probably didn’t know about Savile Row: this world-famous bastion of traditional men’s tailoring, the go-to for well-dressed gents since the early 1800s, in fact takes its name from a woman. In 1721, Lady Dorothy Savile married Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (he of the Arcade around the corner), lending her maiden name to the street he would go on to build 14 years later. She wasn’t to know it, of course, but it would be nearly 300 years before another woman was to make such a mark on “the Row.”

In 2019, Daisy Knatchbull founded The Deck – the first female-only tailoring house to have a shopfront on Savile Row. For the uninitiated, a woman starting what is, ostensibly, a fashion business on one of London’s most famous shopping streets might not exactly sound like headline news. So, here’s a story to give you a taste of what Daisy was up against.

In 2016, as a PR stunt by her own admission, Daisy became the first woman to wear a top hat and tails to Royal Ascot, a race meet famous for its strict enforcement of traditional dress codes. She barely scraped past the fashion police – there was much consternation over her choice to pair said suit with six-inch stilettos – and the press went wild for the look, plastering her picture all over the next day’s papers in both outrage and applause.

And while we may (rightly) decry the fact that, in 21st-century Britain, all it took was a woman wearing a pair of trousers to elicit raised eyebrows and column inches, this anecdote is, perhaps, the perfect demonstration of why Daisy was the ideal woman to take on the challenge of, well, challenging things.

Her passion is undeniable. We meet in early December 2023 and Daisy tells me she will be spending the run-up to Christmas on a work trip to the United States – far from her family and the festivities in London. When I ask how she spends her free time, she simply laughs at the thought that such a thing might exist. The answer, it turns out, is travel – Jamaica, Dublin, and Hong Kong are on the bucket list – and restaurants. She and her boyfriend are “massive foodies” and favor Casa Cruz, Maison François, and a local Lebanese joint in Queen’s Park she won’t name over fear of no longer being able to get a reservation.

But back to Ascot. The experience made her the de facto figurehead for women’s bespoke tailoring in the U.K. and proved something of a revelatory moment. “That was a catalyst for me to realize that, actually, there’s something bigger going on,” she explains. “Women’s bodies change throughout different periods of our lives, be that menopause or mastectomy or IVF or pregnancy. What we needed was a shopfront for women where they could come and have that incredible tailoring experience in an all-female environment; somewhere cozy and unintimidating, where you don’t feel like you’re walking into your husband’s tailor. So I left my job, started my business, and within two years we were on Savile Row, in the home of British tailoring.”

While being all too aware that the moniker “Savile Row tailor” comes with certain expectations (“It’s no joke, you have to be a global player and people expect the best from you,” she admits), with her tailoring business, The Deck, Daisy has not so much joined Savile Row’s boy’s club as carved her own niche within it. She describes the other tailors on the Row as “super supportive,” but of course, by catering exclusively to women, there is no need for them to feel threatened by her success. Would the experience have been different had she also offered menswear?

“I think it would be less special,” says Daisy. “We’ve built an incredible community of wonderfully engaged, amazing women. We’re able to talk about things that are uncomfortable, which would never be possible if we’d done tailoring for men and women. Women are coming in and talking about their body image and their changing bodies. There are tears, so many tears, of joy and sadness. It’s almost a therapy session.”

Speaking to Daisy, it’s clear that it is the emotion attached to her clothes that makes the hard work worth it. Having founded her business in the height of the Me Too movement, she describes her mission at The Deck as, on the one hand, sending “a loud message, shaking up Savile Row, and challenging the status quo,” and on the other, being aware that, for many women, a made-to-measure suit is an entirely new and often daunting experience.

To this end, while anything and everything is possible (want a leopard-print three-piece or a picture of your horse embroidered on your jacket? You name it, they’ve done it), Daisy has distilled The Deck’s core bespoke offering down to four signature silhouettes: Single-Breasted, Double-Breasted, Safari, and Boyfriend. “People often feel overwhelmed by choice and when you’re doing things in a couture way it’s hard to envision what they’ll look like,” she explains. “The truth is that all silhouettes look good if made proportionally – women just haven’t had that opportunity.”

As with anything on Savile Row, pieces from The Deck don’t come cheap. But, with 40% of its clients making repeat orders, the proof of the pudding, one suspects, is in the wearing. “The client looks at themselves in the mirror and you can see they think they look good. They have that cheeky little smile or that way they hold their head,” says Daisy. “We also get people sending flowers and writing letters from all over the world, saying things like, ‘I got my promotion because I felt so good in the suit’ or ‘I bumped into my ex-husband and I rocked it in the divorce.’” Further evidence: The Deck has become a go-to for some of the world’s coolest women, among them suitwearer extraordinaire Lauren Hutton, as well as Elizabeth Hurley, Adjoa Andoh, and Gillian Anderson.

And while there has been much wringing of hands over the post-pandemic demise of the business suit and the death of traditional menswear, Daisy is adamant that, for women, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

This is in part, she concedes, thanks to the more versatile nature of womenswear. She describes her favorite weekend look as “a three-piece pinstripe suit with trainers and a T-shirt” and there’s an undoubted cool factor to wearing one of The Deck’s tuxedo jackets with jeans and ballet pumps. If a man, on the other hand, were to arrive at a London pub on a Saturday afternoon wearing a tailored jacket with Levi’s, the look would land somewhat differently.

For Daisy, the far more pressing issue on Savile Row is where the next generation of tailors is going to come from. “Finding skilled people post-Brexit and post-pandemic is hard,” she says. “A lot of very skilled people went back to their home countries, which was a real crying shame because there was so much talent in this country.”

While programs like Golden Shears, an awards competition celebrating the work of apprentice tailors, are doing their part, you only need glance inside Savile Row’s workshops to know that young blood is rare. “A lot of these artisans have passed their skills on for generations and [getting] young people excited is really important,” adds Daisy, who herself employs an all-female team of tailors (an even rarer commodity). “It’s important to reinvigorate people and remind them that these skill sets die out if they’re not protected.”

Yet the success of The Deck suggests an exciting future for high-end tailoring in London – and Daisy is certainly an inspiring role model for anyone looking to make their name in this industry. Five years after she set up her atelier, the business draws an enviable list of clients, many of them pictured on her company’s website. In the Tailoring the Trailblazers project, created in collaboration with photographer Candice Lake, wearers of The Deck’s suits are depicted alongside a quote about what, to them, it means to be a woman. Among them is Daisy herself, wearing the company’s classic brown Prince of Wales Suit and mustard-yellow stilettos. Alongside her photograph is her statement: “To be a woman is to live your life as a force to be reckoned with – being resilient, unapologetic, bold, vocal, and unboxable.”