One of the things that has impressed me most over the years with my Whitcomb & Shaftesbury tailoring is how consistent it has been. 

That might not seem like the most exciting thing to praise, but it happens surprisingly often that an English tailor looks at a fitting garment and says something like “now why did they do it like that?” referring to their coatmaker. Or a southern Italian tailor’s fit changes from one suit to the next. 

Whitcomb have always been consistent and precise – bang on the money – and I think when I went out to visit their workshop in Chennai I got a good sense of why. 

The English coatmaker Bob Bigg has been going out to Chennai for 20 years. He built the workshop from the ground up and you can see his influence everywhere. Few tailors get a chance to do that, certainly for a tailor this size (25 people work here).

Apprentices sit next to masters, copying and repeating the work. The work manager sits at a small desk in the middle, with a detailed plan of who is making what, for when. 

Bob used to come six times a year, now it’s more like two. But he arrived a couple of days after us and it was good to see him going round and checking everyone. “I focus mostly on the apprentices these days, as the masters know what they’re doing,” he said. 

Amusingly though, the tailors have decided to do some things their own way. For example they like to pattern match the jetts on a pocket, where Bob likes the jett to run against the grain of the rest. 

The former looks nicer (Anderson & Sheppard are known for it) but the latter is a little bit stronger. Neither is right or wrong, and the strength issue is a minor one concerned with decades if not generations of use; it’s a small question of priorities. 

Also, Bob is teaching everyone the traditions he was trained in 50 years ago on the Row. The local tailors are a little more aware of other traditions – they have a couple of copies of the Bespoke Style book around for example, and talk about suits and styles they’ve seen online. 

If there is a ‘father of the house’ (as there is in the Houses of Parliament) it is Yusuf (above). He is 80 years old, has been at the workshop for 17 years, and has an incredible life story. Starting off in poverty on the streets, he trained to become a tailor and then rose in seniority, raising three children of his own who are all now in professional jobs.

Quite a lot of the workers have tailoring backgrounds like this. Nizam (first image below) is another of these and one of the masters. “Where I came from everything was just sewn on straight and then pressed flat,” he said. “So the hardest thing to learn was the 3D shoulder and armhole. But that’s now my favourite part of the job.”

Several of the workers are members of the same family. Suhail (second image below) is a third-generation tailor, and his uncle used to work at Whitcomb until he passed away recently (aged 90). But people are split on whether they’d like their children to be tailors. 

“The aspiration here is often that you work a job like this your whole life, so your child can have a better education and become a doctor or an accountant,” says Mahesh, one of the two brothers that runs Whitcomb. (Mahesh lives here and is in charge of the workshop; Suresh lives in London and runs the atelier there; they left jobs at Sapient and Goldman Sachs to do this full time).

“This is a bit of an issue for us of course – we’d like other family members to join, but when they don’t we have to look to workshops elsewhere in India,” says Mahesh. “Quite a few are from Calcutta for example.”

Talking to members of the team in turn, the most satisfying part of the job seemed to be when they see people wearing their suits. Weddings are great, for example, because the suit has such pride of place. 

But they also see executives around the world wearing them. Among the customers having things made when we visited were the head of a big European luxury conglomerate and the CEO of an American television network. On a recent trunk show in the US Whitcomb say four of the PS readers they saw were two US generals and two US senators.

At a more everyday level, there was a lovely moment in the workshop when I spotted a suit being made for a lawyer in the US who is also a consultancy customer of mine. We took a photo of me with the suit, joking that I had flown all the way to India to check on his commission. 

As with any workshop visit, the greatest thing for me personally was seeing all the people that put their hard work into my tailoring. It inevitably brings me closer to the product and makes it more personal. 

Every time I’m looking at piece of Whitcomb tailoring now, I’m watching for those little touches that were pointed out to me, such as the way the front edge of a waistcoat is curled slightly inwards by the tension of the stitching (above). And I imagine watching the tailors doing it, always pulling the thread taut with their little finger because Bob says it’s the best way to ensure you don’t pull too hard. 

At the end of the second day myself, Bob and our photographer Jamie spent an hour posing for photographs with everyone – individually, in groups, as a team. I don’t think I can recall a visit to a workshop anywhere where there was such pleasure and good will. 

Thank you everyone – Mahesh, Bob and the team – for your incredible hospitality.

For more on Whitcomb, there is a review of a bespoke suit and a comparison to the Savile Row-made service.