In his 1924 short story, “Rich Boy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald summed up the incomprehensibility of the absurdly wealthy: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
And just think — he hadn’t even heard the story about the $50,000 coat.
It’s a nondescript, navy overcoat, single-breasted with two side pockets, and looks like “something you might find on Macy’s clearance rack” — yet it costs more than what the average American makes in a year.
The coat’s owner, Keith Lambert, a wine-company executive from Australia, wanted the garment to protect himself from the brutal winters spent in Canada on business. So instead of going to L.L. Bean, he commissioned the piece from one of the world’s most respected bespoke tailors, John Cutler, a man whose family shop in Sydney has outfitted everyone from Cary Grant to the Duke of Windsor.
The coat’s creation is chronicled by journalist Meg Lukens Noonan in “The Coat Route: Craft, Luxury & Obsession on the Trail of a $50,000 Coat” (Spiegel & Grau), as she traces its intercontinental, months-long creation — and in the process gives us rubes a peek into the ultra-luxe world of the super-rich and their sartorial perversions.
To make Lambert’s coat, the author traveled to remote mountains in Peru, where small llama-like animals called vicunas provide wool cloth that is softer and more expensive than cashmere.
Buttons, made by a 150-year-old English firm, were molded out of water buffalo horn and buffed to a matte finish that Cutler agreed was “more elegant” than the shiny kind.
Lining the jacket, far from any prying eyes, is blue-patterned, hand-printed silk purchased from Stefano Ricci, one of the world’s greatest silk designers, who only agreed to do it if Cutler agreed to “tell no one” and “never ask again.”
Also inside is a gold bar above the inner breast pocket and a gold chain, designed and engraved by one of the world’s best engravers, John Thompson (who designed Princess Diana’s wedding invitations), adding another $4,000 to the overall price tag.
Yet, if you walked past Keith in his coat, you wouldn’t even shoot him a second glance. And that, believe it or not, is the point.
The coat is what Tom Wolfe called the “secret vice,” a “clubby, little-seen world of bespoke tailoring, where ‘knowing, not showing’ is the unofficial mantra,” writes Noonan.
Bespoke tailoring — a word that originated 400 years ago when customers would “bespeak” or reserve a piece of cloth — is a specific term that means “custom-made using a client’s exact measurements and specifications to create a unique pattern that will be sewn almost entirely by hand.” Bespoke fans include Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Jay-Z.
And this club — largely recession-proof — is only growing, thanks to shows like “Mad Men” and “Downton Abbey.” While the economy slogs along, global luxury apparel became a $50 billion business — growing at 8% over the last three years, according to The Boston Consulting Group. This is even observed on the micro, bespoke level. In 2012, Saville Row, a famous group of bespoke tailors in London, made 10,000 suits — up 10% from the previous year.
There may be more to this upswing than glamorous TV shows. Bespoke tailoring seems to hit directly at the universal need to feel special, to feel taken care of — the difference being that the very rich can actually make these fantasies reality.
When Keith Lambert walked into Cutler’s tailor shop, he wanted a new overcoat, but it was also no secret that he had been publicly sacked as CEO of Rosemount Estate Wines by his own father-in-law.
“You fit a man’s mind as well as his body,” Culter often would say. What does the $50,000 coat mean about Lambert’s state of mind? Lambert does not venture to say.
But another Cutler devotee, a radiologist and champagne-bar owner who is quoted in the book, does. Buying his clothes “helps all the misery you experience during the day go away. If I didn’t have my little ray of sunshine at the end of the day, there would be no point of me working — no point in me living — because the stress we undergo is enormous.”
But how much stress does a $50,000 coat relieve?
Not enough, it seems.
“Well, I have a birthday coming up,” Lambert tells the author at the end of the book. “And I have always had my eye on a second coat — especially now that I’ve relocated to Canada. I thought, why not? I could buy a car, but I would only have the car for a few years.”
By the publication of this book, Lambert had ordered two more vicuna coats — one in tan and one in black.