If you're a young cad about town and you'd like to be dressed by the venerable tailors at Turnbull & Asser, you'll most likely need a baronetcy or the letters HRH appended to your name. Savile Row sartorial does not, after all, come cheap. The Fayed brothers, who founded Bespoken, know this as well as anyone—their family owns Turnbull & Asser, and they began their line after apprenticing there. Bespoken is a sort of entry point: It's sharp and it's made in the same factories as T&A, but it's (relatively) affordable and it's sold at Bloomingdale's. "Savile Row meets rock 'n' roll," was how Liam Fayed described it at the label's Anglophilic New York presentation today. Bespoken is English tailoring on a school year abroad.
These are suits for the man on the move. High-twist Italian yarn makes them wrinkle-resistant, and the handful that are made of performance fabric from British Millerain—the original coated cotton provider—should stand up to some punishment in style. The Fayeds and their partners, the Goncalves brothers, have had the run of the Turnbull archives and they've made good use of it: There are collaborative shirts, ties, and pocket squares of vintage fabric, plus plenty of inspiration from the vault. Natty stuff, on the whole. The balance teeters a bit between the upstairs and downstairs, though. You could get vertigo going from the upper-crust-y frog-sleeve dinner jacket in one look to the patch-pocket cotton waistcoat in another, which would be a fine casual look for the gardener.
