Congratulations from everyone at the Savile Row Bespoke Association (SRBA) go to Brian Lishak, who is celebrating sixty years at work on our celebrated street.

Brian started out on Savile Row as a junior sales assistant at Row stalwart and SRBA founding member H Huntsman & Sons before progressing to shirt cutting and, finally, the position of Managing Director. And then, in 2001, Brian and Huntsman’s Head Cutter Richard Anderson (pictured with Brian, right) famously branched out on their own and founded the new Savile Row house Richard Anderson Ltd, another SRBA member.

Some of Brian's earliest and most memorable days on Savile Row were spent travelling to the United States and Canada to visit clients and take fittings and orders, a tradition that he and, indeed, other Savile Row tailors maintain to this day.

Brian disembarked the Queen Mary in New York on his first sales trip to the United States aged just seventeen sixty years ago this year, so it was apt that Richard Anderson hosted a party for him at the city’s Carlyle Hotel to celebrate his milestone anniversary.

Prior to the party Brian and Richard spent two days taking orders and fittings, and just an hour before the evening’s proceedings commenced Brian's last customer of the day was his first ever customer from sixty years ago. The gentleman, now in his nineties, ordered a suit, just as he had when he first met Brian as a seventeen-year-old apprentice.

Brian has always championed British fabrics and for his 60th anniversary trip, together with Richard Anderson he commissioned special lengths of exclusive tweeds and patterned cloths, based partly on the cloths he was selling fifty years previously. These fine patterns, more complex to weave, but striking in their appearance, had fallen out of use, but Brian fittingly revived them and his customers met them with no little appreciation.

Naturally, Brian has seen some changes in his time on Savile Row, but as much he appreciates and works to maintain its traditions, his embracing of change and progress has also worked to keep him at the pinnacle of his trade: “I’ve always believed that however good you are, you have to be relevant to the market. Our customers still want to look smart and stylish, whatever they’re wearing. Casual wear is a challenge now. We move with the times. That’s Savile Row.”