The Contour of Luxury Spring/Summer 2018 | Page 58
Q & A
Alexis Day
Your fashion career started in the late 1970’s, at which
time you developed an interest in made-to-measure.
That interest over the years became what is now the
Mark Powell brand, which was established in 1985,
offering made-to-measure, bespoke tailoring, and
today includes ready-to-wear. What was it about
made-to-measure that initially appealed to you?
Mark Powell
How it all started for me really, is that I’ve been
going to bespoke tailors from a very young age, and
designed suits. I mean, I’ve been doing this since I
was about 12 or 13. I was into the subcultures since
I was a young guy and I was always into fashion and
style. When I couldn’t find particular things that I
wanted I would just get them made. And that’s really
how the whole interest started. So, I was designing
suits really by the time I was 14, 15 years old, and a lot
of my style influences, which really are what you can
see in my work today are very nostalgically inspired,
but obviously I’ve always known how to make them
more a bit contemporary. But really, it was a passion,
and not something that I just decided, “oh I like
this, I’m just going to try and do it.” It was actually
something that was a personal passion that I had, and
when I started to work in quite an upmarket men’s
retail around Savile Row, in and around Savile Row,
is when I started to learn a lot about tailoring and
how to measure made to fit suits and designing suits.
But I had already been designing suits literally since
I was a teenager.
Alexis Day
You’re renowned for your classically inspired
tailoring, in fact, so much so that your clothes have
attained iconic status. However, it’s not so surprising,
as you bring a peerless flair to bespoke tailoring. How
did you foster your enviable tailoring skill?
Mark Powell
Well really, I mean as I say, I think probably back
in the beginning when I started I was directly
influenced by a period style or look. So, if I did a sort
of 40’s inspired look from an old Hollywood movie,
or something from the 60’s from the or the British
sub cultures like the Mods or stuff like that, I would
always do something pure to the style of the era, and
I’d do my research to get that completely correct and
right and how it should be. But obviously over the
years what I’ve done more is I’ve refined and taken
my own influences from all of the different periods
and managed to create my own style through that.
So I think it’s really important that some of it looks
current as well. You don’t want it just looking like
so period, cause then it just looks like costume, and
really that’s were I think I’ve got a lot of advantage up
on a lot of people, and as you know that again there’s
a sort of interest again in vintage style, particularly
with tailoring and stuff like that. Really, I was really
the modern pioneer of that whole thing. I mean, if
you pick up books like the ‘History of Savile Row’
you can see a lot of that in the book when they talk
about my thing. I’ve got about 8 pages in the Savile
Row book, the ‘History of Savile Row,’ and you know
a lot of my style was taken from that, but it is still
relative and very much a part of what contemporary
style is about today. And a lot of things that I tend to
do, normally is that I just don’t follow anybody else, I
just do my own thing. And then normally a couple of
years later people start picking up on what I’ve been
doing and sort of follow me, you know?