Tailoring of the sort practised on Savile Row is where skills operate at such a pitch as to seem almost magical. It is little short of miraculous how a tailor can judge a man and, by taking a couple of dozen measurements, translate each human body into a set of two dimensional paper patterns, which in turn are used to create a three dimensional garment entirely unique to the wearer. During the fittings a man's uneven shoulders are levelled; the prominent seat is disguised and the pigeon chest appears to disappear; all part of the alchemical process of transforming lengths of inert cloth into a garment that takes on the life of its wearer. Modern manufacturing technology may be able to reproduce a standard piece of clothing perfectly a hundred or even a hundred thousand times. Only a great tailor can create something that is both anatomically correct and entirely sui generis, fitting both the mind and body of its wearer perfectly.

However many times I visit my tailors (I have a weakness for bespoke clothing that has led me to a number of tailors over the years) I never lose that sense of wonder upon seeing a finished garment for the first time: a perfect piece of clothing, a genuine one-off work of human genius, part art, part science, the product of the simple yet at the same time infinitely complicated interaction between all the processes of the world's greatest tailors and my instructions.

The beauty of Savile Row tailoring is its personal nature. A tailor knows his customer as well as a doctor, a lawyer or a priest, and the best tailors develop an almost intuitive understanding of their customers; it is high time that the Savile Row's customers around the world developed a little understanding of the magic that their tailors conjure up day after day in the cutting rooms and workshops of the West End of London.

Instead, the cutters, tailors, coatmakers, trousermakers and trimmers of Savile Row have just been too... well... British about the whole thing. The result was that anyone with a convincing line of patter could slip a tape measure round their neck and set themselves up as a bespoke tailor. New terminology was bandied about: semi-bespoke is one of my favourites, meaningless at best yet confusing and obfuscatory, designed to blur the lines between true bespoke and mere made to order.

Tailoring had to change, I know that, but for a while it became like the Wild West with outfitters from overseas claiming to offer Savile Row quality at Far Eastern factory prices, or fashion designers leaping on the bandwagon promising to revolutionise bespoke tailoring and remake it in their own image. True tailoring has no need for such flashy distractions. True tailoring takes time; on the part of both the customer who has to wait and the tailors who gain their skills only after years of apprenticeship: generations of accumulated experience are expressed through the dextrous fingers of these craftsmen.

I think the turning point came when the name of a well known Italian clothier was associated with what appeared to be an astonishing public attack on Savile Row. Apparently it was all a terrible misunderstanding, however the positive outcome is that at last The Row has decided to lift the veil of centuries of secrecy and discretion to actively promote and... yes... 'market' its rich culture.

This website is a part of that activity, and it will tell you what, in the eyes of Savile Row, makes a bespoke tailor. It will inform you about all sorts of arcana including felling, interlining, crookening, basting and dozens of things with which hitherto only a handful of master tailors working in the West End of London have been familiar.

However the mechanical activity of cutting and assembling a suit, a sports coat, a pair of trousers or a waistcoat is only part of the intensely personal process of becoming well dressed. A Savile Row tailor liberates man from the tyranny of fashion. The act of commissioning a suit is an act of empowerment: the man dictating his needs and wishes, which are then expressed in fabric.

An overview by Nick Foulkes

At some stage in their lives most men, most gentlemen anyway, come to an understanding and an appreciation of bespoke tailoring.

My own inculcation was part genetic part empirical: my grandfather was a man of considerable style; I admired the way he dressed and it was he who taught me that the Prince of Wales, later the Duke of Windsor, had set the standards of male style across Europe when he had been a young man. Having grasped the grand-paternal theory I began my own apprenticeship in the appreciation of bespoke clothing as a teenager at boarding school, scouring Sussex jumble sales for old suits.

That was in the Seventies, a time when bespoke tailoring seemed doomed in the face of increasingly casual attitudes to dress and the rise of ready to wear men's fashion. I found that old clothes, the best of which had been made on Savile Row, were better made, better looking, completely individual and altogether superior to anything that was on sale in the shops in 1979.

Almost thirty years later these same qualities inform my apparel choices and anyone who is guided by such principles will sooner or later - and the sooner the better - wind up crossing the threshold of one or other of the great tailors of Savile Row.

There are of course great tailors to be found in every country but Savile Row is the locus classicus of male elegance and for centuries the reputation of an unremarkable street in the West End of London has influenced the way that men dress.

At this point I ought to say that I am congenitally disposed against organised marketing initiatives. I can admire them for their cleverness and I can take a certain pleasure in the way in which they attempt to alter my opinion, but on the whole I prefer to discover things for myself, or at least allow myself to believe that I do. After all that is the way I came to bespoke tailoring. However when I heard that Savile Row was finally getting together to protect its standards and promote its good name, I was relieved. Had Savile Row existed in any other country by now it would be protected and cherished as a national monument and have been denoted as a sartorial appellation controlee.