Stay true to yourself because at the end of the day you can't lie to yourself.
I'm an advocate for buying few, but very good quality pieces of clothing, and if you do that you need to take care of them.
I think you have to humble yourself before the process of starting and running a business. Only the incredibly fortunate achieve their success quickly. Most people, it takes many many years of incredible hard work, and many periods of severe poverty, and it kind of makes it all the better.
Casual to me implies a lack of care or thought.
The tailoring may be a softer, more draped, but I don't believe it's any less smart. For sure it feels more relaxed, it's a different kind of elegance, but I'd never call it casual.
Winning was such as confidence boost, and fashion is a lot about confidence.
Buy products of genuine lasting value from brands that take their manufacturing seriously. I have things that are 75 years old, like the dinner suit of my grandfather's that was made in 1933 by a tailor in Edinburgh. Clothes develop stories. You can remember where you've been through clothing that you've worn. I want products that are going to endure. I hate that we buy things that are disposable. We need to buy products with integrity.
I don't make cocktails with whisky. I'll always drink it with a little bit of water. I love Negronis early on, but for me drinking whisky is something I do at the end of an evening. It's a midnight-to-3-a.m. drink for me.
I think we like to romanticise about past eras, and for sure there have been great ones (like the 1820s maybe, or the 1530s) but I don't think London has ever been more culturally and sartorially rich as it is now.
In a funny way I think social media is making people less rather more experimental. People are too worried about looking good all the time. When I grew up you could get it all horribly wrong and it didn't matter, there was no record.
I like making sure that I've got a decent haircut, my beard's a decent length. I trim it once a week and that's all I need to do. Also, shoes polished. Just put yourself together properly. It's about self-respect, but it's also about having a bit of respect for the people you're interacting with on a daily basis.
Work really hard, think carefuly about how you spend every penny, and be absolutely true to your own vision of your clothes and your brand. It has to be personal.
I loved the filthy, gorgeous rawness of Charles Jeffrey. You just wish you could be young enough and cool enough to be part of his gang. That's what fashion's all about.
The mistake many people make when they go to a bespoke tailor is they often think they need to do something special - either an interesting design feature, or a particularly interesting or unique-looking cloth. I say do the opposite. Stick to something really simple, because this will be a suit that you will really want to wear, so start with something very straightforward and you will get an enormous amount of joy wearing it.
I think you'd have to be a pretty brave man to say "never go out of style," but men's suiting has been relatively stable for 100 years now. The single-breasted, two-button gray flannel suit, you could've worn it in exactly the same cut, shape and fabric in 1910 as you wear it in 2010.
There was a time when black and navy blue suits were pretty much everything you saw. That has completely changed. People are wearing big checks, checks with browns and blues and shades of gray, and the scale is very large, and some of them are very bold with heavy contrasts.
