The suit comes north: a Leeds label is selling women’s tailoring the way men have bought it for a century

The first thing Nina Bakshi does when a customer walks into her studio in Holbeck is ask them to put on the jacket they already own. “Almost every woman who comes in has one,” she said. “And almost every one of them is wrong. Too long in the sleeve, too tight across the back, pulling at the button, bought in a size that fits the shoulders and gapes at the waist, or the other way round. Men have known for a hundred years that a jacket off the rail is a compromise. Women were never told.”

Bakshi, 38, trained on Savile Row and spent nine years cutting for men before moving home to Leeds in 2022 and opening a made-to-measure studio for women in a former shoe factory, in a city that was once the centre of the British tailoring trade and still has the pattern-cutters to prove it. The label, which takes its name from the street, makes jackets, trousers and coats to a customer’s measurements in a workshop two floors up, with a fitting and a four-week wait, and charges from £650 for a jacket and £1,100 for a two-piece suit. This year it will make around 900 garments, up from 160 in its first.

The business has caught a mood. Tailoring has been the dominant story in womenswear for three seasons, from the oversized shoulder of the big fashion houses to the high-street’s rails of co-ord blazers and wide trousers, and the suit has come back as a thing to wear to work, to dinner and, increasingly, to weddings, where Bakshi says a third of her orders now go. But the high-street version is cut to a standard block, in a fabric built to a price, and the fit that makes a suit look expensive is the one thing it cannot deliver.

“A jacket has about 30 measurements in it,” Bakshi said. “Off the rail you get three: bust, waist and hip. If your shoulders are narrow and your back is broad, or you are tall with a short body, nothing will fit and you will spend your life thinking the problem is you.” Her customers are mostly between 30 and 55, many in law, medicine, academia and the public sector, and she says 40% have never owned a tailored garment that fitted. The most common reaction at the first fitting, she says, is silence.

Dr Rachel Ennis, 44, a consultant anaesthetist in Bradford, ordered a navy wool suit in May and wore it to give a lecture in Edinburgh last month. “I had spent 20 years in jackets with the sleeves rolled up because they were too long, and thinking that was just what jackets were,” she said. “The first time I put this one on and the sleeve ended where my wrist was, I actually laughed. It is the most expensive thing I own and the cheapest per wear by a mile.”

The economics work, Bakshi says, because Leeds still has the trade. Her workshop employs 11 people, seven of them cutters and machinists over 50 who learned in the city’s factories before the work went abroad, and four trainees. Fabric comes from mills in Huddersfield and the Yorkshire Dales, 30 miles away, which allows her to offer 200 cloths at a cost that a London house, buying through agents, cannot match. A comparable suit on Savile Row starts at about £3,500.

Competitors are arriving. Two London made-to-measure labels have opened women’s services this year and a Manchester tailor has begun taking women’s orders. Bakshi says she is pleased. “For a century the whole apparatus of tailoring, the cloth, the cutting, the fitting, the idea that a garment should be made for you, was pointed at men,” she said. “We are just turning it round. There is room for all of us. There are a lot of wrong jackets out there.”