Cocktails and Records

There was an interesting documentary on BBC4 this evening about the bespoke tailors based on Savile Row, London. The programme was called, in a suitably restrained way, Savile Row and it depicted what is truly another world.

This was best exemplified when one of the tailors described marketing as ‘vile‘, saying something akin to:

‘We’re proud of the fact that we don’t do any marketing at all and never will. The kind of people who respond to marketing are the kind of people we don’t want coming here. We don’t want that many customers. I’d prefer to employ someone to tell people to go away’.

I am torn between whether this is just good old class snobbishness or the most radical anti-capitalist thing I’ve ever heard a business owner say. It has particular resonance too when the tailors are not paid that well themselves, and are under threat from chain stores, high rents and unsympathetic developers who want to flog their traditional workshops to tasteless overpaid City boys…