Monday 13 February 2012

The Harrogate Suit. *The only truly slim fitting wedding suit available to hire.



Way back in 2010 we here at Jack Bunneys decided to design a new wedding suit for our hire department that would be our Jack Bunney signature design for 2011. This is something that we have always tried to do every year. To have one design or more importantly one image that becomes our signature image for that wedding season. This all started back in 2007 when we had an image taken at a wedding fayre which become a Google favourite. Then in 2008 we had a brown wedding suit image which become incredibly popular, 2009 a brown tail suit image and in 2010 the images of the Worcester suits.
So for 2011 we wanted something that was special! It had big shoes to fill, after all the afore mentioned ranges had been incredibly popular. So we gave ourselves a design brief. A very simple bullet pointed list of must-haves for the design.

  • It must be a definitive wedding suit.
  • It must not be 'main-stream'.
  • It must fit like a made-to-measure or bespoke suit.
  • It must be made from the very best fabric available.
  • Normal rules of hiring suits, should NOT apply.

So we sampled some styles and looked at a million fabrics. And slowly a plan developed. The Worcester range and the Oxford Premium suits were our current 'most popular' designs. And we knew from our customers feedback that they would like a suit which was 'Slimmer' fitting than our 'slim line' suits, they also wanted a style which was in-between the two most popular designs.

With this design concept in mind we had a suit made which we called the 'Half-Tail' , we had it made in brown, and we put it onto display in our shop here. And to our surprise it did not receive a great reception. It was a mediocre response compared to our expectations. But this soon changed.
We decided that the design would look best without a 'wedding' waistcoat but rather a matching waistcoat, so the suit could be worn as a three-piece suit. At this time in 2010 our Worcester ranges were being hired mostly with matching waistcoats and not with 'wedding' waistcoats at all. But this being our new signature range we could not simply have any waistcoat design.

We made quite a few different styles of waistcoat and experimented with different shapes and fits, our favourite became a u-shape dress waistcoat. This style of waistcoat is normally worn with a dinner suit (with a bow-tie) but we decided to use this waistcoat with a slim tie.
We displayed this new three piece, half tail, ceremony suit in our shop with a slim tie and within hours it was sold, within days we sold quite a few and within weeks we sold so many it was obvious that we had created something special.

At this point the design was now settled. And the search was on for the correct fabric. As tailors the fabric is as important, if not more important, than the design itself.
We were looking for a fabric that could be used in the hire (robust enough to be worn more than once and still look good), a fabric that would not crease excessively, a fabric that would reflect the light and look more impressive in photographs than a standard fabric and most importantly we were looking for the right colour. This is how we came to choose a mohair fabric from Vitale Barberis. It is a fabric that as tailors we have worked with before and we knew its limitations and its benefits, we were also lucky enough to have some input into the development of the colours with the mill.

We chose the correct colours eventually from a very small sample swatch. But once we saw the correct shades we just knew that they were what we searching for. And by the end of 2010 we had our finished design and our iconic image for 2011. The Blue and the Silver Harrogate Three Piece suit ; pictured above.

The Harrogate Range went onto be our most popular suit of 2011. We were lucky enough to meet some incredible customers from all over the world who came to our shop to hire and to buy this truly different and remarkable slim fitting wedding suit.

The popularity of the Harrogate Range has increased over the course of 2011 and for 2012 we launched a new range of suits to compliment the Harrogate. We have called this new range the Richmond. It is shorter version of our original 'half tail' design concept.

We also launched a new colour in the Harrogate for 2012. And in our latest photo-shoot created our Jack Bunney signature image for 2012. The Three Harrogate suits standing side by side with slim ties and u-shape waistcoats.

The Harrogate Range is the only truly slim fitting suit, which has been exclusively designed just for weddings, available for hire in the U.K.

Although over the last few weeks we have seen many businesses attempting to emulate our designs, none have managed to match our iconic designs, this is because the design process is part of the finished product. The attention to detail achieved by having that process is unobtainable by simply copying.

The Harrogate, slim fitting , wedding suit is available to hire or buy exclusively from Jack Bunneys tailors. www.jackbunneys.co.uk


2 comments:

mohanscustomtailors said...

that was really cool.

Perfect Attire said...

Nice Article..Thanks for sharing the article.Enjoyed reading it.