I’ve been helping some friends move out of their very grand house in Westminster and into storage. But what to do with all the stuff stashed in the basement and never sorted as it should have been? The velvet-banded curtains from a bygone colour scheme? The 15 year-old Nehru suits (by Boateng), only needing a nip and tuck to be flamboyantly fashionable again? A journey to the hinterland was required – beyond Harwood Road even, to the Curtain Exchange, which deals in old drapes; and to the furthest reaches of SW6, where Major the tailor follows his vocation.
That’s Andrew Major, by the way - son of the late great Demi, a kind, wise old man of the cloth, who counted Taki among his more dapper clients. Issie Blow introduced me to the shop in the Eighties – it was also frequented by her father, Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton - and when we went in on Tuesday, not a thing had changed: the same muted décor, the same pictures of heroes of the trade, the same lovely ladies in the back room, chalking out patterns on rolls of pinstripe and hounds-tooth…
Indeed, it was a day for lovely ladies. On first acquaintance, the two that run the Curtain Exchange are more frightening than one of Gordon Brown’s smiles. But show them some quality, and they’re at least as sweet as Matron and Sister. Both of a certain age, one is plump and fair, the other slight and dark, and they combine a connoisseur’s keen eye with the business sense of a Soros. If you showed them pearl-encrusted silks, and they were slightly faded by the sun, they would smilingly decline. We offloaded about five of twenty bags, and they suggested that we should donate the rest to a drama group as costume material.
French and Saunders couldn’t make them up. Like Messrs Major, they were true British originals. And it cheered me immensely. The day before, I had walked up and down the King’s Road and been bored to death by its homogeneity. Just another global high street, it doesn’t even have room left for the warren of stalls that was Antiquarius. You have to admit, there’s a lot to be said for shabby chic.
