Fraught couture

Number 14, Savile Row, in the heart of London's bespoke-tailoring land, breathes antiquity. From the imperial flag that dangles on a pole over the street, to the basement area through whose windows you can glimpse Dickensian seamstresses hunched over their needles, it has a wheezy air of old-fashionedness. The only visible nod to the 21st century is a video screen that greets visitors by the front door, and shows them footage of a lissom, six-foot Valkyrie striding down a catwalk in a leopardskin pelt.

Number 14, Savile Row, in the heart of London's bespoke-tailoring land, breathes antiquity. From the imperial flag that dangles on a pole over the street, to the basement area through whose windows you can glimpse Dickensian seamstresses hunched over their needles, it has a wheezy air of old-fashionedness. The only visible nod to the 21st century is a video screen that greets visitors by the front door, and shows them footage of a lissom, six-foot Valkyrie striding down a catwalk in a leopardskin pelt.

This is the house of Hardy Amies, a fashion company celebrated since the war for its traditional values and its proprietor's unshakeable belief in good taste and "correctness". It's the last working couture house in London. One can easily guess what the clientele will be like: elderly, aristocratic, misshapen, mutton-dressed-as-lamb... Instead, in the first-floor fitting room I encounter Chloe Delevigne. She is 20, a student of biomedical science at University College, London, and has come in for the first fitting of her dress - a beautiful rayon number, cut in a swooping diagonal, plunging at the front, held up by a solid-looking gold-leather strap. The daughter of a property developer and a stylist, she's no stranger to couture - her mother buys her one garment per season. The rayon frock will cost a modest £500 (the absolute entry-level of couture prices, which can go up to £10,000) and she considers this worth every penny. Also worth it is the experience of having three designers tugging, poking and re-adjusting the material on her body while she stands, Cleopatra-like, admiring herself in the mirror. It's that experience, above all, that makes the couture client feel special.

"I love coming here," says Chloe. "It's expensive, but for what I'm getting I'm doing pretty well. When you're paying that amount of money, you know they care about what they're doing. And I know I'm not going to walk into a party and see someone wearing the same dress. Last year I had a very expensive Matthew Williamson dress, and I saw three people wearing it at three different parties. Getting a dress made to measure makes you feel better. More confident."

This scene could have been witnessed in couture houses in London and Paris at any time in the last 150 years. But it may be one of the last fittings of its kind as the bespoke tradition heads for extinction, doomed by the designer label.

When Hardy Amies died in March last year, an empire crumbled. Hardy was a byword for "rules" about seams and cuffs and hemlines - and held it to be axiomatic that good clothes had to be made to measure. Next year, the firm should be celebrating half a century of holding the royal warrant for dressmaking, but the warrant lapsed with the founder's retirement. The Amies tradition was stranded like an elephant on an ice floe. Who could yank the company into the new world without driving away all its clients?

Step forward Ian Garlant, a tall, skinny man of 42. He joined the company while still a student and has been with it all his working life. He met Amies when the latter was 77, and learnt everything from him over 15 years. He's a bespoke designer to the tips of his trainers. But he admits the house needs to adapt or perish. Will the couture house become an extinct species? "Yes, we could just let it go. If this were a different kind of house, that would have been a viable option. But the basic design philosophy is much greater than that of just making individual clothes. It's not about grabbing headlines. It's about having a philosophy which you constantly reassess and refine and reinvent. My Holy Grail as a designer is to find a constant, forward, gentle momentum."

Even so, he's now setting aside one of his workrooms "for developing a couture model, the sort of thing you've seen on a catwalk, making a pattern from it and turning it into a ready-to-wear version that could be demonstrated to a potential licence manufacturer". You mean, you're going in for (gasp) ready-to-wear? Garlant's face is as impassive as stone. "What we're trying to do is to end up with something that's as near as possible to the design ethos, but is a commercially available product. We're signing an agreement at the end of the month, with a manufacturer."

Garlant had a lot to prove with his first collections after Hardy Amies's death, and he rose to the occasion. At his spring and autumn catwalk shows this year, the audience sat gobsmacked as the new-look Hardy Amies house seized every Amies tradition and drove a coach-and-four through it. There were the traditional tweed jackets, but worn over flouncy petticoats. There were long sensible herringbone dresses, but in purple and pink and jade-green herringbone, with oversized sleeves. There were white leather over-the-knee boots and chokers and zips and tassels. Then, just when I thought I'd seen enough trouser suits to last a lifetime, the catwalk was full of stunning, long, red silk ballgowns with a train flowing behind.

It was while he was a student at Kingston art college that Garlant first met Hardy Amies. "It was a holiday job and I was in a very inferior position. I was literally picking up pins. But when I left, he just said, 'Come back', and that was that. He just liked me." How did they get on? "When I met him he was 77 but, despite the 50-year gap between us, there were few occasions when he and I disagreed about design. He'd spent the whole century watching things going in and out of fashion, he'd seen it all and nothing fazed him."

Amies's favourite fashion period was the 1930s, a decade he described as "witty, tough and very unsentimental". Garlant's ambition is to be "romantic but not sentimental. I'm part-Norwegian and I spend a lot of time in the Scandinavian landscape. It's extremely romantic but you wouldn't call it sentimental." His father was English, and he grew up in Chelsea. "I was very aware of clothes from a early age. My father had a vast collection of suits. We were hugely old-fashioned. We all dressed for dinner - in the Sixties!"

He takes classic Amies styles and puts them through a 21st-century wringer. He is big on zips and buttons, hooks and eyes, belts and seams, and all the bits that hold a piece of clothing together. On a tour of the building he shows me the tailoring room, where a handful of old retainers cut cloth according to brown-paper patterns, and construct fitted jackets around papier-mâché busts; the dressmaking atelier where a brace of women sew up the hems and sleeves of long gowns; the wedding-dress room, the fur room, the stockroom and the spectacular showroom, all mirrors and windows where they mount catwalk shows and sew clients into their frocks.

"It's a very different operation these days," he says with regret. "We used to employ 150 people in two houses, now there's only about 20 of us full time. But the trouble is, the fact that something's made by hand doesn't necessarily make it better than something made in a factory. I've seen exquisite ready-to-wear clothes, and some dreadful handmade things. But where couture still comes into its own is the idea of having something made specially for you. It answers a psychological need. In a world where pretty well everything is available, there will always be individuals who'll want something specially made. They want to demonstrate their difference.

"When I came here in the mid-1980s, it was a marvellous period. The Princess of Wales was the fashion icon, Mrs Thatcher was in Number 10, Reagan was in the White House and greed was good. It was an odd period when politics and finance and social aspiration and society were all mixed together. I had no idea what a heyday we were having. We did very well. Since then - well, I can't think of a single customer now who buys all her wardrobe in couture. It's gone completely, along with the lifestyle that could support a couture wardrobe. There are practical considerations like travel. Wealthy people travel all the time, and don't have time for several fittings, as they used to. We have to speed up the process so that, at the first fitting, the dress is far more advanced than it used to be. People just want to get the thing finished as soon as possible."

Garlant has had to battle for the soul of his couture house. Hardy Amies retired in May 2001, left the house in trust to his staff and sold the business to the Luxury Brands Group. Garlant left. "I knew the people buying it were about to make a number of mistakes, and anyway, I was offered a job elsewhere." What mistakes? "They decided they wanted to develop a line - like Burberry - taking a label and publicising it, developing it. But it failed, because of a mixture of bad timing, lack of funds, lack of experience. It cost a lot of money and went nowhere. There was a big launch of Hardy Amies ready-to-wear, lots of press, but it didn't fulfil expectations. The orders were never enough to put the range into production, and the whole thing was cancelled."

The only thing for the firm to do was persuade Amies's heir apparent to return. "My first job was to put on a couple of shows solely to reassure the customers. In spring and summer last year, I put on two discreet and traditional shows. They worked very well, and got most of the customers back." Once he had coaxed the fashionistas back into the fold, it was time to reveal his true colours. Last March was "the first proper collection, the first one done with a view to showing off, to getting new clients. Over the last four years I've had to do a considerable juggling act, reassuring existing clients, getting new ones, looking after licence-holders, and attracting potential new ones."

And now he's offering three or four designs to a manufacturer. Within a year there could be Hardy Amies dresses in Harvey Nicks. Hardy Amies Ltd, the dinosaur of dressmaking, is going to hit the streets. Only, this time, they know what they're doing.