British menswear lost an icon on Sunday when Savile Row tailor Edward Sexton passed away, aged 80. He was best known for his groundbreaking work in the late Sixties and Seventies alongside collaborator Tommy Nutter, dressing the likes of Mick Jagger and The Beatles, redefining the codes of British tailoring in the process.
As a child, the Dagenham-born, South London-raised clothier boasted an innate talent for sartorial design, shared not with his mother (a cleaner for the BBC) nor his father (a public health inspector), but with extended family members who practised the same trade. It was at his cousin's trouser-making workshop that he cut his teeth during the school holidays before leaving education at age 15 to work for popular East End tailor Lew Rose.
Spells at Harry Hall, Kilgour, French & Stanbury and Welsh & Jefferies followed – experience that earned him a formative position as a cutter at Donaldson, Williams & Ward. It was here he met Tommy Nutter, a subversive, eccentric salesman-turned-designer who shared Sexton’s desire to shake up the conservative tailoring scene. The two swiftly forged a friendship, and eventually – with financial support from several VIP clients, including Cilla Black and The Beatles manager Peter Brown – opened the doors to their very own Savile Row store, Nutter's of Savile Row, on Valentine’s Day 1969.
Their disruptive, trailblazing take on suiting changed the course of fashion with its lean build, wide lapels, cinched waist and square shoulders. The Beatles instantly adopted their newfangled look, with three of the four members wearing a Sexton-Nutter number on the album cover of September '69's Abbey Road. Andy Warhol, Eric Clapton, David Hockney and Twiggy soon followed suit. So too did Mick Jagger who enlisted Sexton to forge a suit from cream gabardine for his wedding to Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías in St Tropez, France, during the spring of '71. Once a Jagger, Bianca soon began rocking Sexton designs as well.
Nutter and Sexton further dismantled traditions when their store became the first Savile Row spot to embrace an open window approach, inviting passersby to peer into the shop and enjoy its dazzling displays. In a 2022 interview with the Financial Times, Sexton remarked that their shopfront injected some excitement into what was a “very boring street”.
In 1976, Nutter’s was renamed Edward Sexton after the former sold his shares to the latter; 14 years later, Sexton departed from Savile Row and set up shop as a bespoke, appointment-only tailor in Knightsbridge. Right up to his death, he spent his days fashioning statement suits for world-class acts, particularly those with rock and roll sensibilities – Harry Styles, Mark Ronson, Adam Lambert, to name three.
Just last October, Sexton made a grand return to Savile Row with a deluxe flagship store dreamt up by Daniel Hopwood’s interiors enterprise, Studio Hopwood. It’s positioned just a few doors down from where Nutter’s once stood and is every inch as charming and alluring as its namesake. It will preserve his legacy with its stock of once revolutionary, fit-for-a-rockstar designs that are proudly displayed in the large, inviting storefront windows.
