Taking his scissors to the Savile Row rulebook

IF you walk down Savile Row today, you will not miss number 40. Among the Guard of Honour-style line-up of mannequin busts in beautifully cut blazers, a sartorial rebellion is taking place.

 I come face to face with a mammoth, multi-coloured patchwork bomber jacket with Gieves & Hawkes behind me, tailors whose flagship has stood at 1 Savile Row since 1912. The comic proportions of this garment fill the window.

“It’s probably the most photographed, stopped and looked-at window on the street,” says Rav Matharu, the 40-year-old founder and creative director of Clothsurgeon, welcoming me inside. “And you have the Beatles plaque and the Kingsman signs on this road! The big bomber is a massive guerrilla marketing tactic.”

Matharu founded his trailblazing “bespoke streetwear” fashion house in 2010, providing clients — counting rap royalty Drake, A$AP Rocky and Kendrick Lamar alongside A-listers Kevin Hart, Riz Ahmed and FKA Twigs — with any design they want, in whatever fabric they desire. That could be a cashmere and tech-fabric tracksuit embroidered with Marcus Rashford’s dog Saint, which he made for the footballer’s 21st birthday, deconstructed Patagonia duffel bag jackets as commissioned by Selfridges, or custom hats and T-shirts, like the ones he made with the England team days before they headed to the World Cup in Qatar.

Gimmicks like giant jackets are not commonplace on the road that was once the primary stomping ground of Masters of the Universe. But Clothsurgeon landed here in August as an original — the first to offer tailored streetwear on the Row, and the first to be South Asian owned and led. Matharu, whose parents are Indian immigrants and raised him in Leeds, does not take this lightly.