"Give three piece a chance": this play on words that combined two icons of British culture (John Lennon and tailoring) was the motto chosen by people who, wearing suits impeccably cut, they were publicly demonstrated in 2012 in London during one of the strangest protest actions in recent years.

This group of chaps – this is how this particular subculture is known, which does not understand ages, but does understand types of tweed – thus rebelled against the opening of a new youth clothing store in the London capital, scheduled for April last year. The brand, Abercrombie & Fitch, was the least of it. What was decisive for them was that the location chosen by the American firm –and which finally managed to open its doors– was in Savile Row, that small street in the Mayfair neighborhood that condenses the history of the English suit in its few meters in length and, therefore, extension, the history of men's clothing in general.

Last summer, the Victoria & Albert Museum, after several months digging through its archives, brought to light the results of its latest investigation and concluded that most of the male wardrobe was conceived in England; from brogues – die-cut leather shoes with laces – to tweed, passing through patterned ties, the trench coat, the three-piece suit or the tuxedo.

And it is precisely when investigating the origin of this last garment that the name of Henry Poole emerges, the first tailor who moved his workshop to this street with mythical resonances. Heir to a family business that thrived on making English military uniforms during the 19th century, Poole turned his surname into a worldwide signature when in 1865 the Prince of Wales asked him to design a jacket for his informal dinners at the countryside. After a stay at the prince's summer home, financier James Brown Potter asked the tailor to make him a similar one. Upon his return to New York, Brown wore the garment to the Tuxedo Club, a salon for gentlemen of American high society, and the model became popular in the city. Today, the technical name for the tuxedo jacket is tuxedo, but the English, following a very British desire to protect their heritage, prefer to call it a dinner jacket, the name given to it by Henry Poole.

Suppliers to the monarchy since the days of Queen Victoria, the success of the tuxedo led the house founded by Poole to open several stores in the main cities of Europe, to dress figures of the stature of Napoleon III, William Waldorf Astor or Winston Churchill already house more than three hundred employees. At the call of success, many other tailors, eager to suffer the same fate, moved to the street that dressed the most powerful men in the world. They did it with a working method that today is still the essence of bespoke tailoring: there are no predetermined sizes, but the exact measurements of the client. Finally – and this is perhaps the most striking – no machine is involved in the process. The patterns are drawn and cut on the fabric, and the suit is assembled stitch by stitch, completely manually, by a team of craftsmen experienced in tasks as specific as embroidering buttonholes, sewing vests or finishing the side seams. "It's the masculine equivalent of haute couture," says American James Andrew, a true guru of men's fashion in the Internet age.

It is an image that underlines one of the constants in English tailoring: its close relationship with the monarchy and with the British aristocracy. Sometimes, in an apparent contradiction, it happens with names as innovative as Hardy Amies, who opened his workshop five years before, in 1950, he was commissioned to create the personal wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth II, who had just ascended the throne. In a world emerging from a world war, the luxury of yesteryear was out of place. Likewise, the female presence in the workplace had grown considerably. For this reason, his proposal was a women's wardrobe based on the materials, techniques and finishes typical of men's tailoring. Perhaps unintentionally, Amies had invented power dressing, the quintessence of the sober, functional and moderately flirtatious style in which hundreds of women would look at each other for decades.

However, Amies never stopped seeing men's tailoring as his main contribution. His was, in 1961, the first male parade in history. For him, McQueen and Galliano were "terrible". “His clothes seem to be taken from the Folies Bergère”, he came to affirm. Curiously, they had both trained as apprentices on Savile Row. Galliano, for example, did it under the guidance of the so-called rebel tailor: Tommy Nutter. Nutter's clothing revolution had arisen in the wake of a similar outcry from outraged chaps: it was 1968 and the influence of the Beatles, already a style benchmark throughout London, had yet to reach the temple of British tailoring. So he set up a small workshop at number 35, financed precisely by Peter Brown, one of the managers of the Liverpool band.

From that moment on, wide lapels, velvet, flowered shirts or flared trousers became part of the hitherto strict masculine code. Nutter himself recognized in the book Savile Row Story that “everyone wore tight suits in the late sixties, so I decided to transgress and cut the huge lapels as wide as possible. It was my first model and it was different from all the others.” For the first time, the Savile Row style was not only exportable to palaces and mansions, but also to concert halls, nightclubs or record covers. "Tommy filled Savile Row with glamor and made it accessible," said Elton John, another of his main clients, on the occasion of the retrospective that the Design Museum gave him in 2011. With an aesthetic between the neatness of the mods and the colorism of the hippies, there was no icon of Swinging London that Nutter did not wear.

With the arrival of the 21st century, the legacy of this small London stronghold was overshadowed by large distribution and, above all, by a new batch of male designers who were beginning to gain notoriety under the umbrella of major firms such as Dior, Lanvin or Givenchy. . Savile Row remained more like a nostalgic tourist area than a true commercial street. Given this, the tailors decided to group under the name of Savile Row Bespoke Association, a kind of union that claims the survival of the trade with new apprentices, the drop in rents and the need for the British Government to consider their work as heritage of the country. .

The rise of men's fashion and the establishment of catwalks is the perfect excuse to relaunch many of these emblematic firms. Some have even decided to walk together during London Fashion Week.

Its commercial resurgence, however, is currently in the hands of Asian executives and entrepreneurs, who have begun to see growth possibilities in the sector and to become directly involved in it. Today it is no longer surprising to learn that Gieves & Hawkes, opened in 1771, has belonged since 2012 to the Hong Kong group Trinity, one of the arms of the powerful Fung family. The financial branch of the same family also owns Hardy Amies, whose expansion policy combines tailoring with more accessible lines (in fact, they have just landed in Madrid and Barcelona). They also continue at number 14 Savile Row, where a team of tailors accepts private commissions in which there is not a single stitch that has not been made by the hand of a craftsman. It is contradictory that, situated in the commercial maelstrom of business groups, the balance of Savile Row continues to depend on the needle, the thread and the soap: the same tools with which Henry Poole, almost 150 years ago, founded a of the longest-running cottage industries in fashion