Anderson & Sheppard Brand Guidelines: The 1906 English Drape Tailor Off Savile Row

A Swede, a Dutchman and a softer coat.

Anderson & Sheppard dates itself to 1906, and the independent record agrees. W magazine, in a March 2008 profile, says the Swedish tailor Per Anderson founded the firm that year, and a Reuters report of May 2023 gives the same date. The company’s own history calls him Peter (Per) Gustav Anderson and says he was already an established Savile Row tailor when he founded the company “as it is today.” Its other name came from his partner, the trouser cutter Sydney Horatio Sheppard.

The house style came from a third man. The company says Anderson was mentored by Frederick Scholte, a Dutch cutter and master tailor working on Savile Row at the turn of the 20th century, and apprenticed with him before developing the cut himself. Scholte’s line, known as the London Cut or English Drape, was by the company’s account a reaction to the narrow, constricted tailoring of Victorian times and the more structured military tradition of the street. It calls Anderson and Scholte “renegades” in their day. Scholte had a client in the Prince of Wales, later the Duke of Windsor, the company says, but kept a low profile and was reluctant to take on new customers, so society went to Anderson and Sheppard instead.

In 1927, the company says, the business outgrew its first shop and crossed the street to a larger corner site on Savile Row, where it stayed for almost eight decades. W likewise places it there from the 1920s.

One cut, kept for a century.

The company describes the English Drape as a small, high armhole with extra fullness through the sleeve head, a natural shoulder with minimal padding, a full chest with a vertical drape, and a very light canvas. Managing director Colin Heywood calls the mix of drape and high armhole “a bit of ‘sartorial magic,’” on the company’s website. It says the same cutter who measures a customer cuts the pattern straight afterwards, so that details of proportion and posture stay fresh in the memory. It also tells a story of Fred Astaire dancing around the fitting room, watching in the mirrors to see whether his coat stayed flush against his neck.

The company names Charlie Chaplin, Cole Porter and Rudolph Valentino in the 1920s, and Gary Cooper, Laurence Olivier and George and Ira Gershwin in the decade after. A 2011 interview with Anda Rowland published by Vuelio adds Marlene Dietrich, Noël Coward and Francis Bacon, and names Bryan Ferry and Manolo Blahnik among clients of that time.

The firm long kept quiet about its clients. The company says it “eschewed publicity,” and that while other Savile Row houses moved into ready-to-wear and made-to-measure in the 1970s and 1980s, it stayed with bespoke. Rowland told Vuelio in 2011 that the firm did not advertise and had not historically spoken to the press. Even so, it became a training ground: W and Vuelio both report that Alexander McQueen trained there at 16, Vuelio specifying as an apprentice coat maker.

Making stays close to home, by the company’s account. It says it produces all its clothing in its cutting rooms and workshops on Old Burlington Street and the immediate vicinity, that a suit takes upwards of 60 hours, and that machine work is kept to a minimum. Rowland told Vuelio that every piece of cloth was cut on the premises and that all its tailors were based in the UK, most of them nearby. The company says most of its cloth is woven in England, Scotland and northern Italy.

Cloth, chalk and the shop window.

Tailoring houses have an unusual advantage in presenting themselves: the work itself is graphic. A bespoke order follows a set sequence. The customer and tailor choose fabrics, linings and details, the tailor takes measurements and drafts a pattern from scratch, and the cloth is chalked out and cut with shears before being basted for a fitting. Chalk marks on cloth, paper patterns on hooks and a cutter working at the board are the working tools of that sequence, and they also make natural pictures for a house’s windows, pages and packaging.

The street matters too. Savile Row in Mayfair, London, is known principally for bespoke men’s tailoring, and tailors have traded there since at least 1803. Its windows can be a statement in themselves: when Nutters of Savile Row opened in 1969, it used bold displays created by the then unknown Simon Doonan. In Italy the home town often takes the street’s place, and a house can put a place name at the front of its story, as Zegna does with its mill in the Biellese Alps.

Cloth carries the identity as well. Fabrics and linings are chosen at the start of an order, which puts the fabric book in the customer’s hands early. Mills keep their own record of that work: the Zegna archive at Trivero holds sample books alongside technical drawings.

The words matter as much as the images. A bespoke garment starts from a new pattern, made to measure adjusts an existing one, and ready-to-wear comes in standard sizes. In June 2008 Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority ruled that an advertisement calling a suit cut and sewn by machine “bespoke” did not breach its code, and the term has stayed contested since.

Off the Row, and into New York.

The family behind the modern firm arrived in the 1970s. W reported in 2008 that the businessman Roland “Tiny” Rowland bought Anderson & Sheppard in the late 1970s, and that the Rowland family then held an 80 percent stake, with cutters and managers holding the rest. His daughter Anda Rowland left Parfums Christian Dior in Paris in 2004 to run the business day to day, and became vice chairman; Reuters still gave her that title in 2023.

Sources describe the ownership in different ways. English Wikipedia says she has owned the firm since 2004. The UK’s Companies House register lists Josie Rowland as the person with significant control from 2016, and Anda Rowland from January 2022. A new company, Anderson & Sheppard Holdings Limited, was incorporated in December 2025, with Anda Rowland recorded as holding 75 percent or more of its shares.

The firm’s address has changed. It left Savile Row in 2005 for a street nearby. W says the lease expired in 2004 and the landlords wanted higher rent; the company says the building was due for redevelopment. The new shop on Old Burlington Street was about a third of the size, W reported, and the company puts it 176 yards from the old one, while Vuelio says about 300 metres. The company says the open design lets customers walk through to the cutting room and see the wall of customer patterns.

The business has since widened. Vuelio dates the firm’s website to 2005. In 2011, the company says, head cutter John Hitchcock became grantee of a Royal Warrant to the then Prince of Wales, who made an official visit in 2012. That year a Haberdashery opened on Clifford Street, selling ready-made clothing and made-to-measure trousers. In December 2024 MR Magazine reported the firm’s first shop outside London, on the second floor of Bergdorf Goodman’s men’s store on Fifth Avenue, and described it as holding a Royal Warrant to King Charles III. The firm also travels: the company lists four trips a year to the United States and two each to Hong Kong and Seoul. It says it has more than 60 staff and an in-house apprenticeship programme.

For a design guide, Anderson & Sheppard shows how a house can make one cut, rather than a logo, the thing people recognise. Compare Henry Poole & Co and Huntsman, two other London tailoring houses. For this guide we use a slate, a chalk white and a pale card tone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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