By Manish Puri.

Sat by the window of The Red Lion just off Jermyn Street, Nina Penlington tells me what first led her to Savile Row: “My plan was to learn some tailoring skills and move into designing menswear. After about six weeks I realised that ain’t happening. Not everyone can be Lee McQueen.”

That was 18 years ago, and since then Nina has gone on to cut for three very different, long-established houses of the Row: Dege & Skinner, Gieves & Hawkes and, most recently, Edward Sexton – working under Edward himself until he passed in 2023.

In 2024, Nina took some leave for health reasons. “It gave me some head space, and I started to sketch some of the designs that I’ve been thinking about for years. My drawings are a bit shit, but they got the ideas out of my head and helped me refine my voice aesthetically.” This year she started her own brand: Nina Penlington Bespoke.

While Nina says she doesn’t have a fixed house-style, I think it’s fair to say there is a strong house-culture. 

It’s one where British rock ‘n’ roll glamour mixes with the hazy psychedelia of Laurel Canyon Americana. Where a velvet suit is de rigueur for popping into the shops and getting a pint of milk and a scratch card on your way home from a night out. (Nina has previously made tailoring for Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, so there’s probably more truth to that description than I realise.)

Underpinning it all is a sense of fun mixed with thoughtful intention. “Clothes are not something to take too seriously. But making clothes is something I certainly take seriously,” she says. Both facets are perhaps evident in the photo above of one of her offshore bespoke commissions – a single breasted dinner suit in a wool/mohair cloth by Smith Woollens, crowned with a xeroxed image of Bryan Ferry. 

The style is fairly typical of what one can expect from Nina: padded shoulder, moderately wide lapel, high armhole and a higher, suppressed waistline. Nina offers a full bespoke service requiring a minimum of three fittings alongside a cheaper offshore programme where a suit is cut by her, but basted and finished offshore after one fitting. 

One of her signature pieces is the ‘Get Back’ suit inspired by a three-piece worn by Paul McCartney during The Beatles valedictory public performance on the rooftop of 3 Savile Row in 1969. 

“I’ve spoken to so many customers about this suit over the years,” says Nina. “It looks like a smart, classic 60s West End suit, but what’s interesting is how Macca makes it feel so casual when he wears it with beaten-up shoes or a grubby grandad shirt.” This is the suit I’ve commissioned (or, as Nina calls it, “the Manish version of the Get Back suit”), and I’ll review it in the autumn.

That gig (and the 2021 film that documents it) has proved an inspiration to Nina in more ways than one. “I love how the stage-managed image of ‘The Fab Four’ evolved into four guys with very individual styles; they’re untethered from what had come before. I’m fascinated by that creative freedom, and I feel like I’m now in a place where I get to make the clothes I enjoy.” 

She catches herself, buries her face in her hands and hastily adds: “Not that I’m comparing myself to The Beatles!”

Nina expands on what that freedom means for her clients: “At a big tailoring house, you’re working to someone else’s time – which is right. But now I get to choose how I spend that time. I feel unencumbered, and have the space to think about each individual and their style and the garment I’m making for them.”

Some of that time is spent reading and responding to the cloth once it’s laid out on the board. “What might feel right on paper, might not work when it’s chalked out. What’s the cloth telling you? I might want to change the lapel slightly or add a lapped seam.”

Of course, everything is done in consultation with the customer. “There’s no point if you won’t wear it. And I really want people to wear their good stuff – life’s too short. But I do have more confidence telling you what I like, which is part of what I think people are paying a cutter for.” 

And taking cues from the cloth is how Nina loves to work. It’s the reason she’s curating a bunch of her favourite fabrics along with suggestions on the styles she thinks they complement best; this can then be presented to a new customer, which I think is a great way of introducing them to the brand’s world.

“Often a cloth dictates to me what it should become as a suit”, she says. A prime example of this is the development of her Western suit, something Nina toyed with unsuccessfully for years, until a customer came in with a twill overcoat cloth that had the right weight and robustness for what she envisioned.

And now the Western suit she offers is full of technical and hand-finished elements that call upon her past cutting experiences. Consequently, this style is only available through the full bespoke programme.

The pockets are curved ‘smile pockets’, finished at each corner with arrowheads that are hand sewn by Nina using a heavy thread specially sourced from a notions shop in New York.

The jacket has no centre-back seam – a style Nina is familiar with from cutting mess kits at Dege & Skinner – and so the rear yoke isn’t merely a decorative Western signifier, but instrumental to adding shape to the back and helping the jacket hug the neck. The yoke on the trouser performs a similar function in place of darts. All the yokes are felled and top stitched by hand.

These details and techniques have been refined over time. “My style is wildly different to Davide [Taub, head cutter at Gieves & Hawkes], but I learned a lot from him in the way he would look at one element of a garment, get obsessed with it, and evolve it slowly until it was perfected.”

The house model that might initially strike you as counterintuitive is the Everyday Velvet suit. After all, isn’t velvet nocturnal? A vampire cloth only seen after dark in candlelit dining rooms and smoke-filled cigar lounges? “One of the things that makes a suit rock n’ roll to me is taking a cloth that’s mostly associated with evening wear and wearing it whenever you want,” says Nina.

And so, the Everyday Velvet reframes the cloth into something that can be worn for any occasion. The style is based on a vintage velvet suit Nina had as a teenager. “Growing up in north Wales in the 90s, I wore a lot of vintage stuff and got the piss taken out of me a lot because vintage wasn’t cool the way it is now. But I adored that suit, it eventually fell apart and I’ve never been able to replace it until now.”

Nina describes the jacket as “casual country” with big patch pockets, swelled edges and most strikingly a notch lapel. “A lot of customers expect it to have a peak lapel, but I’m slowly pulling them over to the dark side.” Another subtle subversion of the traditional velvet dinner jacket.

Given her love of vintage, it’s no surprise that Nina (like many tailors and designers) embraces the idea of her suits becoming ‘future vintage’. But her motives are less about proving durability or stylistic longevity, and more concerned with the story it tells others about the original owner.

“I think you buy vintage for the life of a garment. And when you wear it you get imbued with its history which influences how you feel in it. I recently bought a ridiculous shearling coat in San Francisco, and every time I put it on I think: who was the groupie that wore this?”

So how does she want the wearers of her tailoring to feel? “I want an ordinary guy to feel like a rock star,” she says. It’s a declaration that resonates, in a summer where the triumphant return of Oasis and the passing of Ozzy Osbourne have got me thinking about why so many people seem to be yearning for old-fashioned rock stars.

I think it’s because the essence of a rock star is someone who presents a truly authentic and individual expression of themselves, but in today’s cultural environment that authenticity is harder to find – or maybe it’s just harder to believe. So feeling like a rock star might simply mean developing an individual style and wearing the clothes that feel most like you. “It’s not about leather trousers and a skinny tie. It’s about having the freedom to dress as you wish,” says Nina.

To readers who prefer that dress to be more backstage than front man, more George Martin than George Harrison, I should say that the eclectic playlist of Nina’s house specialties (the ‘Get Back’ suit, the Western, the Everyday Velvet) are merely jumping off points – a shorthand for communicating her visual identity.

Within reason, there aren’t many restraints on what you can make – this is bespoke, after all. “I’m more than happy to make a morning suit or a classic business suit,” she says. Although, interestingly, Nina estimates that as many as 95% of her clients don’t wear her suits to work. Presumably the 5% includes artist and musician Emma Richardson, who’s planning on wearing her full bespoke suit on the job – it just happens to be on tour with the band Pixies.

But flexibility of bespoke aside, there’s no doubt that Nina’s is a style with a clear and strong viewpoint, which inevitably means it won’t be for everyone. She’s sanguine about such things: “Finding a cutter is about finding someone you align with. It’s like going on a date, they might tick all the boxes, but you need to have chemistry.”

Whatever your take, and for the record I’m a big fan, I hope we can agree that the state of bespoke tailoring has always been invigorated by the impetus of a fresh perspective – albeit here one that’s been honed over nearly two decades in the trade.

Not that Nina believes she is pioneering something new. “I’m not sure if it is possible to do anything entirely new now, unless you’re a really avant-garde designer. But I’m not a designer, I just love the craft.”

And it’s true, Nina Penlington Bespoke does evoke some of the uproarious spirit of 70s trailblazers Nutters of Savile Row. She’s just turned the volume down slightly, to better suit today’s audience.  

Manish is @the_daily_mirror on Instagram

Nina Penlington is on Instagram @ninapenlingtonbespoke, and can be contacted at ninapenlington@gmail.com. Her upcoming US trunk show dates include New York (September 18-19), Washington DC (20), Nashville (22-23), Los Angeles (25-26) and San Francisco (29-30).

Prices (ex. VAT) from:

• £4500 for full bespoke

• £5500 for Western suit

• £1995 for offshore bespoke (Offshore is limited to classic styles. More details to come in my review article)

Photos of Nina courtesy of Peter Zottolo. Photo of Emma courtesy of James Burns.