Tailor to icons: meet fashion's 'Mod buddha'

John Pearse is the Swinging Sixties legend who is busy dazzling the next gen of fashionistas, says Joe Bromley

- Joe Bromley

VERY few young people can afford, or have the faintest desire to save up for, a tailor-made garment. Those that do probably go to John Pearse. I find the 77-year-old tailor in his airy shop on the pedestrianised Meard Street in Soho, which is buzzing in the way it only does when the sun is beating down. Pearse, never one for moving to Savile Row ("I'm much more exclusive here," he says), looks seasonally suave in aslouchy beige suit, sitting on his leather sofa. He offers me a cup of tea. "Yes, please," I respond. "I'll have one too. If you find the girl downstairs, she can help you make it," he says. Off I go then.

The basement houses his studio which he first began renting 40 years ago. The walls are lined with prints, freestanding rails are full of finished (and still to be fully-realised) jackets, and two of his employees are busy making a tweed jumpsuit for one of their clients. I rattle back up the stairs with two fine bone china cups and saucers, and take a seat.

Pearse secured his first assisting job at the Jermyn Street tailor Hawes & Curtis in 1960, when he was 15. "They had the Duke of Edinburgh and lots of good clients," he says, beginning to laugh. Alexander McQueen infamously claimed to have stitched "I am a c***" into the lining of a jacket he made for the then-Prince Charles during his tailor's apprentice days, which came two decades later. "I did the same for the King's dad," Pearse says. What did he write? "Some scrawls of stuff that remains secret."