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John Cutler is a gentleman’s gentleman who, for over half a century, has toiled at the helm of his family ’s bespoke suiting business.

By Tracey Porter - images courtesy of Richard Weinstein

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“The ultimate means an ultimate expression but it also means an ultimate quality. What I’m doing could be compared to any art form. It’ll be made as a sculptor would make a sculpture, as a painter would make a painting, as any artisan could do. If you want to relate it to fashion - it’s not fashion – but if you had to relate it to fashion it would be more catwalk than showroom. Not something that people might wear but directional and conceptual.”

The seed was planted in 2006 when he was commissioned by wine executive, Keith Lambert, to produce a piece that global media would later term ‘the most precious coat in the world’.

John had waited years to find the right client in which to craft a garment from the precious vicuña wool he had in his possession. Woven from the gossamer fleece of the vicuña, a rare camel-like creature found only in the wilds of the Andes Mountains in South America, he had secured the fabric from one of J.H Cutler’s long-term fabric suppliers nearly two decades earlier.

Taking months from conception to creation, Lambert’s made-to-measure navy blue coat brought together the very best elements a humble Sydney tailor could offer his most discerning client. It was lined with Italian silk, had buttons crafted from Indian water buffalo horn and was trimmed with an 18 carat gold plaque created exclusively by master engraver John W Thompson. Everything, from cutting to sewing, was completed by hand.

Such was public interest in the coat, author Meg Lukens Noonan later wrote a book about it – The Coat Route: Craft, Luxury and Obsession, on the trail of a $50,000 coat.

Taking its cue from the coat concept but upping the ante in terms of exclusivity, John sees The Ultimate Collection as a range of five or six garments spread across three tiers, which together represent an inspirational fusion of art and craft.

While some of the finer details are yet to be worked out – including the exact shape, form and structure of garments – John says there is likely to be a handmade three-piece suit, blouson, silk trousers with perhaps a smoking jacket and a top coat included in the mix.

As a man whose attention to detail is legendary – he has built into his walking stick a vessel containing his aftershave and once made a jacket for himself with space in the lapel to carry chopsticks - the devil will of course be in the detail.

And to this end at least, the concept is well advanced.

“If you’re going to make a good cake you’ve got to have the best flour, the best eggs the most pure water – if one of your ingredients is wrong, your cake doesn’t turn out. Everything that goes into [the collection] has to be the best I can obtain and use. It’s got to be practical but an ultimate expression of that article,” he says.

18 carat gold hand engraved chain

Some of Cutler’s all important tools – tailor’s wax, needle and thread, and thimble

To label it a dream would be doing it a great disservice yet to call it a vision, even more so.

Because the concept that J.H Cutler's principal, John Cutler, intends bringing to fruition is both of these things but also much, much more. It is, for all intents and purposes, a legacy and one that has been more than 50 years in the making.

John Handel Lawson Cutler was just a teenager when he was first inducted into the family business started by his great grandfather, Joseph Handel Cutler, in 1884. Having grown up in a household where the important men in his life were always impeccably dressed, he struggles to recall a time when any other vocation was considered.

The first piece of clothing he ever completed was a jerkin, a short sleeveless men’s jacket lined with hand-stitched silk and constructed from hide sourced by one of his classmates. Yet at just 15 and a half, while his friends completed their schooling, John spent his mornings at the coalface in the J.H Cutler workroom in Sydney, learning about the intricacies of garment construction as well as the more mundane tasks of bookkeeping and selling.

Shortly after, he left the safe confines of home to study at the renowned, Tailor and Cutter Academy in London, before honing his craft at the home of bespoke tailoring – Mayfair’s Savile Row. He was just 27 years of age when named managing director of the family business following the retirement of his father Bruce.

Today, John's reputation as a master tailor is so strongly forged among the big end of town that everyone from the international social elite to Australia’s best known politicians, entertainers, sports commentators and legal professionals have his suits, shirts and trousers in their ever expanding wardrobes.

Yet, as he first acknowledged 20 years ago, bespoke tailoring in the truest sense is a dying art. For this reason, John still goes to great lengths to ensure that he does the bulk of the contact work with all of his clients.

“My grandfather used to say ‘you have to fit the mind just as much as the body’. Half of my job is getting into people’s heads and trying to understand what the commission is that they’re giving me.

“I can make something that is technically brilliant but if it doesn’t fit the person’s mind, if it’s not what they want, it doesn’t matter how good it is, they won’t be happy with it.”

Tailoring has provided John with more than just a place of work. It has fulfilled a creative compulsion as well as provided him with an outlet through which he has been able to indulge his passion for people – in all their shapes and forms. Yet still he wants more.

For more than a decade now, John has harboured a desire to create a small collection of clothing he sees as “the ultimate expression of a tailor’s art form”.

The master at work

Australian opal buttons Pure silk lining

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Assistance for the collection has already been sought from many quarters with a series of local and international artisans agreeing to support him in turning his dream into reality.

In relying on relationships cultivated over many years, John has been able to lean on suppliers to secure some of the world’s rarest fabrications to use in the collection, including lightweight pure silk velvet made by Parisian fabric weavers, Dormeuil Frere, with whom J.H Cutler has been working with for 131 years. In addition, John hopes to source a modern casual tweed from British supplier, Dashing Tweeds. All thread used in the garment construction will be silk.

Long term J.H Cutler collaborator, John Thomson, has been engaged to design and hand-make unique 18 carat gold hangers for each garment in the collection, while John has been working with Sydney-based illustrator, Edwina Buckley of Lollilu Textiles & Illustrations, to design a unique peacock lining that will be a key signature of each piece in the collection.

“The whole aesthetic concept for a peacock is that they open up to show their glory. Women have got all the colour. So I’m turning it around and saying ‘why can’t the man be the peacock and indulge in a bit of colour.’

“I often encourage people to stretch the boundaries in the linings. With linings you can do anything. If a groom is having his suit made I tell him to keep it from the bride but to bring in some photos of her or them as a couple and I can have those photos incorporated into the lining. In its own special way, the lining of the suit then says ‘I’ve always loved you’. Lining is very important.”

In addition, John has been in talks with jeweller, Justin Schwartz of Quorra, on the concept of using jewels as buttons.

“[The idea behind it is to] have a decent sized button made from encrusted jewels such as black diamonds, pearls or opals that are backlit and appear as though they come from your soul.”

Designed for show and not for wear, the pieces that comprise The Ultimate Collection will be presented in glass cabinets to enable them to travel and be displayed in different locations – such as an upmarket store, a museum, gallery or hotel foyer. John believes the collection is unlikely ever to be put up for sale. But if forced to put a value on it he considers it would sit around the $1 million mark.

To complete The Ultimate Collection offering, each piece will come with its own book written and illustrated by long-term Cutler collaborative partners, journalist David Dowsey and photographer Richard Weinstein, detailing the intricacies of each garment’s construction. The presentation will also be top notch with bespoke furniture maker, David Boucher, already on board to craft a unique box in which each book will appear.

The second stage of the project will see John produce a second bespoke version, designed to be admired but also worn, that would retail for around $200,000 in total.

A more commercial collection – dubbed The Gentleman’s Wardrobe, with a price point of around $85,000 – would boast many of the same elements as the main 'Ultimate' collection but more likely to appear in the form of two formal suits, a casual suit, a dinner suit, a blazer and a pair of trousers.

This version would be made the classic bespoke way and not by hand, he says.

“I’m an artisan and artisans don’t make money. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a house, I don’t own a car, I just live nicely. The Ultimate Collection may be a way of using my experience, my abilities and my dreams as superannuation. [However] it’s also a way of using my 51 years of experience in an ultimate sort of way.

“I could just retire, die out and go quietly. But that’s not me, I want to make a statement and that statement has a lot to do with keeping the bespoke and the pure process alive.”

Cutler was also responsible for coming up with Richie Benaud’s cream Channel Nine coat.