Bespoken recently picked up a client in the form of the NoMad Hotel, for whom the designers—the Fayed and Goncalves brothers, with the august Turnbull & Asser marque behind them—designed the staff uniforms. "NoMad" is a portmanteau (it stands for "North of Madison," the hotel's neighborhood in newly coined New Yorkese), but it was enough to set the gentlemen thinking. "What is a nomad?" Liam Fayed mused at the label's Spring presentation: travelers, wanderers, gypsies—and so the guys were off. Paging through books by the mid-century photographer Josef Koudelka, who shot the gypsies in the late sixties, the boys noticed how sharply dressed the Roma were, albeit a little rough around the edges. Which is exactly how many a young man of today wears his suit. Bespoken offered him plenty of lightweight options, broken in by washings and enzyme treatments, in spring-friendly coated cottons and cotton-linens. The introduction of unstructured tailoring has brought Bespoken's prices to even more affordable levels, while the line continues to grow (Spring saw the deployment of a full tie collection). No wonder the retailers continue to come knocking, and what was meant to be a pop-up at New York's menswear temple Odin turned into an extended stay. "We were supposed to be there for a month; it's been a year," Fayed laughed. Even a gypsy stays put when he's got a good thing going.
