Photos: The Dapper, Besuited Gentlemen of Anderson & Sheppard

Fred Astaire

Dancer. Rehearsing in New York with Eleanor Powell, 1939.

Rudolf Valentino

Actor, 1926, one of the first from Hollywood to cross the threshold.

Rite of Passage

Inside the new Anderson & Sheppard shop, at 32 Old Burlington Street, London.

Cary Grant

Actor. With Rosalind Russell on Oscar night in Los Angeles, 1942.

Calvin Klein

One of a number of prominent designers who have been clients, 1987.

Bill Blass

Designer. At home in New York, 1999.

Patterns & Specials

Left, each client’s measurements are fashioned into a template. Right, a selection of cloth woven exclusively for Anderson & Sheppard.

Tom Ford

The designer in 2007, the year he launched his own line, Tom Ford Menswear.

Virtuosos

John Hitchcock, left, the head cutter and managing director, and David Walters, the trimmer.

Prince Charles

With Camilla Parker Bowles at Windsor on their wedding day, 2005.

Baron Guy de Rothschild

Banker. At Longchamp racecourse outside Paris, 1980.

Manolo Blahnik

Designer. At Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 2008.

Sebastian Guinness

Gallery owner. County Dublin, Ireland, 2008.

George Hamilton

At the Hotel Plaza Athénée in New York, 2008.

Jean Pigozzi

Art collector. Albany House, London, 2008.

The bespoke tailor Anderson & Sheppard enters its second century as the standard-bearer of Savile Row craftsmanship. Anderson & Sheppard has two simple rules. First, a suit shouldn’t wear the man—the man should wear the suit. Second, the moment a man is overdressed, he is badly dressed. Visitors to the establishment retain vivid memories—the fabric books in the paneled reception room, the selection of buttons on the walls, the leather-bound ledgers in which clients (Chaplin, Astaire, Cooper, Fairbanks, Dietrich, Coward, Murrow, Harriman) have signed their names and had their measurements recorded. A new book, Anderson & Sheppard: A Style Is Born, edited by Graydon Carter and Cullen Murphy, and with text by David Kamp, tells the story of the firm from its founding to the present day. It is a showcase for the efforts of Christopher Simon Sykes, who photographed the shop’s current interior and the cutters and tailors at work, and Jonathan Becker, well known to Vanity Fair readers, who provided photographs of the shop at an older location and also took portraits of a score of living Anderson & Sheppard clients, from Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson to Bryan Ferry and Nicolas Roeg. We present here some photographs from the book—the shop itself, and past and present clients in their Anderson & Sheppard garments.