You may not recognize the name of Tommy Nutter, but you almost certainly know his clothes. Picture Elton John in the 1980s, playing piano on a vast arena stage while wearing a heavily padded suit that is half black, half white, like a yin and yang symbol. Or imagine Bianca Jagger sometime in the 1970s, languorous and grumpy in a pistachio-colored men’s suit as she fiddles with her Malacca cane. Or—a sure bet—recall the album cover of Abbey Road: four Beatles marching across the street in northwest London, with John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney dressed in immaculate bespoke.
Tommy Nutter was just twenty-six years old when, in 1969, he opened Nutters of Savile Row. He had no formal education as a fashion designer, and no advanced training as a tailor—nothing, really, except what he once described as an “in-built feeling for clothes.” And yet al- most immediately he found himself outfitting everyone from rock stars to members of parliament, Twiggy to Diana Ross. Within a few years, the Evening Standard pronounced Tommy “as established and as important as any British tailor or designer.” He accrued an avid following in America that stretched from New York to Los Angeles. People raved about his Savile Row suits, describing them as nothing short of art. In the words of one former client, wearing one made you feel like “an honored custodian of something spectacular.” Today, his trailblazing legacy can be sensed in the work of contemporary tailor-designers like Richard James, Ozwald Boateng, and Timothy Everest. Tommy Hilfiger recently credited his “irreverent approach” as an enduring inspiration. Even Tom Ford, arguably the most important figure working in menswear today, has acknowledged his influence.
I first heard about Tommy Nutter several years ago, when a friend told me the story of a young man who once, after being denied entry into a party at the Tate, threw himself into the River Thames. It sounded so outlandish, so extreme and operatic, that my curiosity was piqued. What intrigued me once I did further research, however, was not so much his burnished image as the “Tailor to the Stars”—an iconoclast who shook the foundations of a hallowed industry—but the tension be- tween his vaunted reputation and the realities of his private life.
Here was a man whose suits are now safeguarded in the Victoria & Albert Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, though he could barely manage a backstitch. Here was a man who comported himself with grace and hobnobbed with Princess Margaret at galas in Venice and Munich, yet had grown up above a humble café that catered to truck drivers. A man who’d managed to pull himself out of the working class using nothing more than the strength of his own imagination, an imagination so boundless, it seemed, that it could overcome all rea- son and even prove ruinous.
Tommy Nutter was obsessed with his public image. He was also gay, coming of age in the oppressive censoriousness of the 1950s. Indeed, his life vividly personalized forty years of critical gay history. From the underground queer clubs of Soho to the unbridled freedom of New York bathhouses to the terrifying nightmare of AIDS—Tommy was there, both witness and participant. As a gay man myself, it occurred to me that Tommy’s focus on outward appearances might have been a way for him to take control and overcome the more challenging aspects of his lived experience. After all, one way gay men mitigate the perennial pressure to conform to societal norms of masculinity is by striving for perfection (in body, in clothes, in career), overcompensating until that which sets us apart—our taste, say—becomes so impressive it assumes its own power.
Tommy ultimately died from AIDS-related pneumonia in August 1992. The lives of many artists, performers, and designers were lost pre- maturely to the plague and have since been unfairly marginalized in the collective memory. This, finally, was the strongest motivation for me writing this book: I saw an opportunity to rescue one person’s story from the drift of oblivion.
Of course, when you go rummaging around in the past there is a good chance you’ll stumble across something you never dreamed of finding. It happened to me early in the research phase, when I arranged to meet Tommy Nutter’s brother in a cafe on New York’s Upper West Side.
Seventy-seven years old, David Nutter turned up wearing a crumpled Rolling Stones T-shirt and clutching a tote bag stuffed with the kind of original photographs usually exhibited in a gallery. He had taken them all himself, he said; they were just sitting in his apartment in stacks of cardboard boxes. Over coffee, he made a range of passing references that seemed inscrutable in the moment—to an obscenity trial, to the birth of disco, to Starship 1, to Michael Jackson, to Mick Jagger. It would take me many months to untangle everything, and years before I understood exactly how kaleidoscopic the Nutter saga really was. But I quickly intuited that I was writing a book about two people here, two gay brothers, two halves of a larger, stranger whole.
You may not recognize the name of Tommy Nutter, but you almost certainly know his clothes. Picture Elton John in the 1980s, playing piano on a vast arena stage while wearing a heavily padded suit that is half black, half white, like a yin and yang symbol. Or imagine Bianca Jagger sometime in the 1970s, languorous and grumpy in a pistachio-colored men’s suit as she fiddles with her Malacca cane. Or—a sure bet—recall the album cover of Abbey Road: four Beatles marching across the street in northwest London, with John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney dressed in immaculate bespoke.
Tommy Nutter was just twenty-six years old when, in 1969, he opened Nutters of Savile Row. He had no formal education as a fashion designer, and no advanced training as a tailor—nothing, really, except what he once described as an “in-built feeling for clothes.” And yet al- most immediately he found himself outfitting everyone from rock stars to members of parliament, Twiggy to Diana Ross. Within a few years, the Evening Standard pronounced Tommy “as established and as important as any British tailor or designer.” He accrued an avid following in America that stretched from New York to Los Angeles. People raved about his Savile Row suits, describing them as nothing short of art. In the words of one former client, wearing one made you feel like “an honored custodian of something spectacular.” Today, his trailblazing legacy can be sensed in the work of contemporary tailor-designers like Richard James, Ozwald Boateng, and Timothy Everest. Tommy Hilfiger recently credited his “irreverent approach” as an enduring inspiration. Even Tom Ford, arguably the most important figure working in menswear today, has acknowledged his influence.
I first heard about Tommy Nutter several years ago, when a friend told me the story of a young man who once, after being denied entry into a party at the Tate, threw himself into the River Thames. It sounded so outlandish, so extreme and operatic, that my curiosity was piqued. What intrigued me once I did further research, however, was not so much his burnished image as the “Tailor to the Stars”—an iconoclast who shook the foundations of a hallowed industry—but the tension be- tween his vaunted reputation and the realities of his private life.
Here was a man whose suits are now safeguarded in the Victoria & Albert Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, though he could barely manage a backstitch. Here was a man who comported himself with grace and hobnobbed with Princess Margaret at galas in Venice and Munich, yet had grown up above a humble café that catered to truck drivers. A man who’d managed to pull himself out of the working class using nothing more than the strength of his own imagination, an imagination so boundless, it seemed, that it could overcome all rea- son and even prove ruinous.
Tommy Nutter was obsessed with his public image. He was also gay, coming of age in the oppressive censoriousness of the 1950s. Indeed, his life vividly personalized forty years of critical gay history. From the underground queer clubs of Soho to the unbridled freedom of New York bathhouses to the terrifying nightmare of AIDS—Tommy was there, both witness and participant. As a gay man myself, it occurred to me that Tommy’s focus on outward appearances might have been a way for him to take control and overcome the more challenging aspects of his lived experience. After all, one way gay men mitigate the perennial pressure to conform to societal norms of masculinity is by striving for perfection (in body, in clothes, in career), overcompensating until that which sets us apart—our taste, say—becomes so impressive it assumes its own power.
Tommy ultimately died from AIDS-related pneumonia in August 1992. The lives of many artists, performers, and designers were lost pre- maturely to the plague and have since been unfairly marginalized in the collective memory. This, finally, was the strongest motivation for me writing this book: I saw an opportunity to rescue one person’s story from the drift of oblivion.
Of course, when you go rummaging around in the past there is a good chance you’ll stumble across something you never dreamed of finding. It happened to me early in the research phase, when I arranged to meet Tommy Nutter’s brother in a cafe on New York’s Upper West Side.
Seventy-seven years old, David Nutter turned up wearing a crumpled Rolling Stones T-shirt and clutching a tote bag stuffed with the kind of original photographs usually exhibited in a gallery. He had taken them all himself, he said; they were just sitting in his apartment in stacks of cardboard boxes. Over coffee, he made a range of passing references that seemed inscrutable in the moment—to an obscenity trial, to the birth of disco, to Starship 1, to Michael Jackson, to Mick Jagger. It would take me many months to untangle everything, and years before I understood exactly how kaleidoscopic the Nutter saga really was. But I quickly intuited that I was writing a book about two people here, two gay brothers, two halves of a larger, stranger whole.
