Savile Row Coat
Making Class

Savile Row coat making is by far the most satisfying art in handcraft tailoring. It requires the most skills and combinations of techniques to create a satisfactory outcome.

No one is born with a gift that makes coat making easy from the beginning. We all struggle and fail time and again before turning out a garment we are proud to put our name on, holding it up to the world as an example of a finely tailored handcraft coat.

Handmade should never be used as an excuse shoddy workmanship but rather as a mark of hard work and quality in every stitch. Coat making brings together many disciplines such as basting with fullness, pocket making, hand padding, layered stitching, fell stitching and of course the mark of a truly handcrafted suit, the handmade buttonhole.

Every student of tailoring that ever was, has longed to make a handcraft coat. Too often we just go head first into coat making without honing the important hand skills and machine skills required.
At The HTA, we understand the thirst for knowledge that all aspiring tailors have. When a tailoring apprenticeship cannot be secured, one trawls the Internet and other various materials seeking the
skills they so desperately want to know. There is a sea of outdated, incoherent and often outright misleading information that exists around bespoke tailoring. It is truly astounding.

When Rory launched his free video series, The Making of a Coat, on YouTube back in 2012, he was inundated with requests for apprenticeships. It was clear to him that there were many novices out
there in the same position he had found himself in over ten years before. Something had to be done and something only a dedicated bespoke tailoring school would do. A coat making class needed to be made readily available to anyone who wished to learn coat making.

The dying art of tailoring is a myth propagated by those in the custom suit/made to measure industry. Suit making is alive and well, though the method of teaching has changed significantly.
The rise of suit making courses has been spearheaded by The Handcraft Tailor Academy – one of the first in its field. Its business model has been duplicated by a few other schools that arose in its wake.

Someone had to show the world that handcraft was not dead, only dormant. Coat making is such a specialised field that only an online coat making class could bring it back to life. Realising that in-
house courses were too limited and only a few could afford the time and expense, Rory decided that only comprehensive online tailoring classes would help fill the void. Rory and his team set to work
and after a few short months put together an online how-to video series that has yet to be equalled by anyone else in the industry.

In the beginning, Rory offered live online courses, which was as good as it got at that time but were often met with challenges such as the occasional poor connection. It's the same issue that plagued many tailors who started offering the same services during the pandemic.

To teach hand-sewing techniques, high definition imagery is needed. Rory became accustomed to the idea that a proper tailoring academy needs online video courses explaining in detail how to make handcrafted garments. When a course is organised into episodes and shot using HD
cameras and the latest editing software, no live online course could compete. Coat making seems like the obvious first choice. It is by far the most complex and skilled garment to make, so he needed to explain every technique used in great detail. After almost eight months of shooting, re-
shooting and editing, The Making of a Savile Row Coat was born: the first coat making class of its kind available and affordable to everyone.

Coat making requires so many skill sets that there needed to be supporting courses to help hone one's skills before taking on the art of Savile Row coat making. Rory and his team decided to put
together a trouser making course that focused on machine sewing techniques. Trousers are a great first garment to make as they help hone the machine sewing skills while giving the follower a very versatile garment they can introduce to their wardrobe.

Learning to control a sewing machine is like learning to drive a car. You are in control of it – not it in control of you. The stitch length is your gears, the top of the pedal is the acceleration and the bottom of the pedal is the brake. Two feet are used to control it, one on the top edge and one on the bottom edge. Machine sewing skills are paramount when making any garment, being able to start and stop in the right place every time takes practise, familiarity and confidence. No tailor will
succeed if they don’t first learn to control the sewing machine.

Any tailoring academy is only as good as the tailor who teaches it. Rory trained the old fashioned way: memorising each skill until it became second nature. With our tailoring academy, students don’t need to go to such lengths. They can evolve quickly over time by having each video as a reference. Our online waistcoat making course helps the novice perfect their hand-sewing skills, the needle and thimble working harmoniously together where our trouser making course sets the student up for working on a sewing machine. These two courses together help the novice to prepare for the Savile Row coat making class. Even students who have taken the in-house courses still subscribe online as a reminder of the skills they continue to improve on each day.

The HTA was founded for aspiring tailors around the world achieve their dreams. We are the most competitively priced tailoring academy on the market offering in-house courses at a fraction of the prices of many of our US and UK counterparts. Subscriptions to our video series’s cost £20 per month and offer unlimited access so you can watch as many videos are you want for as long as you like every month.

Whatever method you choose to learn with, you can be confident that The Handcraft Tailor Academy has a program that’s right for you.