News
Wizardry of Oz puts a spell on stars
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Ozwald Boateng is the tailor who has dressed… crikey, where do you start? OK, he has dressed David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Daniel Day Lewis, Robbie Williams, Will Smith, Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne, Anthony Hopkins, Spike Lee, Lenny Kravitz and Jamie Foxx – but not Jeremy Clarkson, obviously.
Anyway, we meet at his shop, which I shouldn't really call a 'shop' – it's the 'flagship store' – on London's Savile Row. On Savile Row, no man is able to buy: 1) a checked baseball cap to be worn the wrong way round; 2) a hoodie; 3) large, flapping, stinky trainers; 4) those jeans that come halfway down the bum.
When I ask Ozwald about the worst clothes he could ever be made to wear, he says it is all of the above. "I'm not into street clothes. Don't understand it. I don't understand those over-exaggerated jean sizes so they hang off your back… ."
The 'flagship store' is gorgeous, darkly glamorous with the clothes hung and arranged as if in an art gallery. Ozwald does 'bespoke couture'. He may even be a 'bespoke couturier' rather than a tailor. Whatever, the suits are beautiful and dazzlingly coloured, the shirts are beautiful and dazzlingly coloured and as for the ties? Beautiful. And dazzlingly coloured. A parrot could fly in and you know what? It would look shabby; it would look like a thrush.
Ozwald says he can make anyone look good. Come on, I say. Rolf Harris? Jeremy Clarkson? He says: "My starting position is different than from a standard designer. You come to me and it's my job to make you look the best you can look. From an image point of view, would I prefer to dress Jude Law instead of Rolf Harris? Of course. But it's my job to make them both look great." I note we are no longer discussing Jeremy Clarkson.
Ozwald was the first to boldly go, colour-wise, where no tailor or bespoke couturier had gone before. He may, he says, have saved Savile Row: "Until I opened a store here in 1994 it was dying. Savile Row was for old people; it wasn't for young people. But I went to Paris to do catwalk shows, as a Savile Row tailor. No one had previously done that. I made tailoring for young people."
The bespoke room is all wood-panelled and chandeliered and not at all like, say, the changing room at Cecil Gee, or so I imagine. Then again, with Cecil Gee, you're not talking up to £1,295 (Dh9,000) for an off-the-peg suit, and bespoke ones starting from £4,500 (Dh31,500).
I ask if there is any difference between bespoke and made-to-measure, and then, because he looks as me as if I'm a bit dumb, I quickly add: it would be helpful for those people who don't know, the idiots! He says: "With bespoke you have a pattern made for you whereas with made-to-measure it's based on an engineered pattern. That is the basic difference."
Although he now lives (with his Russian wife Gyunel, a former model, and their two young children) in the Regent's Park mansion flat that once belonged to Eric Clapton, Boateng grew up in the Wood Green, Crouch End area of north London.
Born in 1968, he is the son of Ghanaian immigrant parents, Mary and Kwesi. Mary had a Singer, ran up clothes, and always had some kind of business bubbling away on the side. "In Ghana, we have these markets that are completely controlled by women. In fact, the economy of Ghana is controlled by women. My mother is an instinctive trader. She's very entrepreneurial."
His father was an English teacher and headmaster who was academically ambitious for all his three children. Intellect was everything to him, and Ozwald went to a private school from three years old until he was eight. "My own kids go to a private school because I wanted them to get the best I could afford, and I think my parents had the same view," he says.
The school had a uniform, which he adored. "You used to wear these great caps, a blazer, a knit, shirt, tie and shorts in the summer. It's where I got my whole taste for the suit.
"At that school we were served a three-course lunch every day and were taught how to use a knife and fork. There was an enormous amount of sophistication in that school."
And any other black children at all? "That is an interesting question, actually. I can't remember. I probably was the only black kid but in that period of my life, colour wasn't something I noticed."
As the story has it, when Ozwald was 14 he spent a summer working in a factory sewing linings into suits, while at 16 he was already knocking things up on his mother's Singer at home.
"My first pieces were slightly crude, but people wanted to buy them," he says. But how did you know how to do it? "It was instinctive. I taught myself. I just worked it out. And every time I did it, it just worked. And the confidence of a 16-year-old who gets it right is outrageous, right?"
By 18, he was selling to trendy boutiques, but still hadn't given up the day job, so to speak, which was studying computers at college. "My father had ingrained in me that when you make a decision about something you stick to it. When I told him I wanted to design clothes he thought I had brain damage!"
He can see, now, that he was doing just the right thing at the right time. "At that time, menswear was very different. Things were very deconstructed. It was the time of Armani and Comme des Garçons and Yamamoto. Nothing had any formal structure." At 23, he opened his first shop on Portobello Road in London, and dressed his first celebrity, Jimmy Page, not that he knew it.
"I didn't know who he was. All I knew was that he had this great house in Holland Park. I was making him trousers and I asked, 'What is your music like?' and he said, 'You know, I've done some good stuff,' and I said, 'Like what?' and he said, 'Oh, you know, Stairway to Heaven…'"
And what, I ask, has been the most memorable moment of seeing a celebrity in one of your suits. He says it has to be the suit he made for Jamie Foxx – "a classic Boateng purple with a short collar" – when he won his Oscar.
Boateng watched the ceremony on TV and when Foxx walked to the stage it must have been, he says, "as euphoric for him as it was for me". "You have to understand the synergy of time, and what to deliver at a particular moment in time that will capture everyone's imagination and that look for him did all of that – but I don't think we have to go there."
He is passionate about what he does and all he does, which is a lot. He's been appointed to the British Prime Minister's Reach committee to help raise the aspirations of black boys. "I'm doing a lot of things in Africa. I've formed a company with two friends of mine called Made In Africa and we are doing a lot of important things across the continent.
"Also, I have my fashion empire to build." (The Independent)
Anyway, we meet at his shop, which I shouldn't really call a 'shop' – it's the 'flagship store' – on London's Savile Row. On Savile Row, no man is able to buy: 1) a checked baseball cap to be worn the wrong way round; 2) a hoodie; 3) large, flapping, stinky trainers; 4) those jeans that come halfway down the bum.
When I ask Ozwald about the worst clothes he could ever be made to wear, he says it is all of the above. "I'm not into street clothes. Don't understand it. I don't understand those over-exaggerated jean sizes so they hang off your back… ."
The 'flagship store' is gorgeous, darkly glamorous with the clothes hung and arranged as if in an art gallery. Ozwald does 'bespoke couture'. He may even be a 'bespoke couturier' rather than a tailor. Whatever, the suits are beautiful and dazzlingly coloured, the shirts are beautiful and dazzlingly coloured and as for the ties? Beautiful. And dazzlingly coloured. A parrot could fly in and you know what? It would look shabby; it would look like a thrush.
Ozwald says he can make anyone look good. Come on, I say. Rolf Harris? Jeremy Clarkson? He says: "My starting position is different than from a standard designer. You come to me and it's my job to make you look the best you can look. From an image point of view, would I prefer to dress Jude Law instead of Rolf Harris? Of course. But it's my job to make them both look great." I note we are no longer discussing Jeremy Clarkson.
Ozwald was the first to boldly go, colour-wise, where no tailor or bespoke couturier had gone before. He may, he says, have saved Savile Row: "Until I opened a store here in 1994 it was dying. Savile Row was for old people; it wasn't for young people. But I went to Paris to do catwalk shows, as a Savile Row tailor. No one had previously done that. I made tailoring for young people."
The bespoke room is all wood-panelled and chandeliered and not at all like, say, the changing room at Cecil Gee, or so I imagine. Then again, with Cecil Gee, you're not talking up to £1,295 (Dh9,000) for an off-the-peg suit, and bespoke ones starting from £4,500 (Dh31,500).
I ask if there is any difference between bespoke and made-to-measure, and then, because he looks as me as if I'm a bit dumb, I quickly add: it would be helpful for those people who don't know, the idiots! He says: "With bespoke you have a pattern made for you whereas with made-to-measure it's based on an engineered pattern. That is the basic difference."
Although he now lives (with his Russian wife Gyunel, a former model, and their two young children) in the Regent's Park mansion flat that once belonged to Eric Clapton, Boateng grew up in the Wood Green, Crouch End area of north London.
Born in 1968, he is the son of Ghanaian immigrant parents, Mary and Kwesi. Mary had a Singer, ran up clothes, and always had some kind of business bubbling away on the side. "In Ghana, we have these markets that are completely controlled by women. In fact, the economy of Ghana is controlled by women. My mother is an instinctive trader. She's very entrepreneurial."
His father was an English teacher and headmaster who was academically ambitious for all his three children. Intellect was everything to him, and Ozwald went to a private school from three years old until he was eight. "My own kids go to a private school because I wanted them to get the best I could afford, and I think my parents had the same view," he says.
The school had a uniform, which he adored. "You used to wear these great caps, a blazer, a knit, shirt, tie and shorts in the summer. It's where I got my whole taste for the suit.
"At that school we were served a three-course lunch every day and were taught how to use a knife and fork. There was an enormous amount of sophistication in that school."
And any other black children at all? "That is an interesting question, actually. I can't remember. I probably was the only black kid but in that period of my life, colour wasn't something I noticed."
As the story has it, when Ozwald was 14 he spent a summer working in a factory sewing linings into suits, while at 16 he was already knocking things up on his mother's Singer at home.
"My first pieces were slightly crude, but people wanted to buy them," he says. But how did you know how to do it? "It was instinctive. I taught myself. I just worked it out. And every time I did it, it just worked. And the confidence of a 16-year-old who gets it right is outrageous, right?"
By 18, he was selling to trendy boutiques, but still hadn't given up the day job, so to speak, which was studying computers at college. "My father had ingrained in me that when you make a decision about something you stick to it. When I told him I wanted to design clothes he thought I had brain damage!"
He can see, now, that he was doing just the right thing at the right time. "At that time, menswear was very different. Things were very deconstructed. It was the time of Armani and Comme des Garçons and Yamamoto. Nothing had any formal structure." At 23, he opened his first shop on Portobello Road in London, and dressed his first celebrity, Jimmy Page, not that he knew it.
"I didn't know who he was. All I knew was that he had this great house in Holland Park. I was making him trousers and I asked, 'What is your music like?' and he said, 'You know, I've done some good stuff,' and I said, 'Like what?' and he said, 'Oh, you know, Stairway to Heaven…'"
And what, I ask, has been the most memorable moment of seeing a celebrity in one of your suits. He says it has to be the suit he made for Jamie Foxx – "a classic Boateng purple with a short collar" – when he won his Oscar.
Boateng watched the ceremony on TV and when Foxx walked to the stage it must have been, he says, "as euphoric for him as it was for me". "You have to understand the synergy of time, and what to deliver at a particular moment in time that will capture everyone's imagination and that look for him did all of that – but I don't think we have to go there."
He is passionate about what he does and all he does, which is a lot. He's been appointed to the British Prime Minister's Reach committee to help raise the aspirations of black boys. "I'm doing a lot of things in Africa. I've formed a company with two friends of mine called Made In Africa and we are doing a lot of important things across the continent.
"Also, I have my fashion empire to build." (The Independent)