John Cutler has spent over 50 years as a master tailor, running his family's bespoke suiting business in Sydney. He has developed a reputation for impeccable craftsmanship and attention to detail. Cutler is now working to create "The Ultimate Collection" - a small collection of one-of-a-kind, handcrafted garments that will showcase the pinnacle of his skills. The collection will feature rare and luxurious fabrics, custom buttons made from jewels, and unique peacock-themed linings. Cutler sees The Ultimate Collection as both his legacy, and a way to keep the art of bespoke tailoring alive for future generations.

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John Cutler is a gentleman’s gentleman who, for over half a century,
has toiled at the helm of his family’s bespoke suiting business.
By Tracey Porter - images courtesy of Richard Weinstein

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“The ultimate means an ultimate expression but it also means an
ultimate quality. What I’m doing could be compared to any art form.
It’ll be made as a sculptor would make a sculpture, as a painter would
make a painting, as any artisan could do. If you want to relate it to
fashion - it’s not fashion – but if you had to relate it to fashion it would
be more catwalk than showroom. Not something that people might
wear but directional and conceptual.”
The seed was planted in 2006 when he was commissioned by wine
executive, Keith Lambert, to produce a piece that global media would
later term ‘the most precious coat in the world’.
John had waited years to find the right client in which to craft a
garment from the precious vicuña wool he had in his possession.
Woven from the gossamer fleece of the vicuña, a rare camel-like
creature found only in the wilds of the Andes Mountains in South
America, he had secured the fabric from one of J.H Cutler’s long-term
fabric suppliers nearly two decades earlier.
Taking months from conception to creation, Lambert’s made-to-
measure navy blue coat brought together the very best elements
a humble Sydney tailor could offer his most discerning client. It
was lined with Italian silk, had buttons crafted from Indian water
buffalo horn and was trimmed with an 18 carat gold plaque created
exclusively by master engraver John W Thompson. Everything, from
cutting to sewing, was completed by hand.
Such was public interest in the coat, author Meg Lukens Noonan later
wrote a book about it – The Coat Route: Craft, Luxury and Obsession,
on the trail of a $50,000 coat.
Taking its cue from the coat concept but upping the ante in terms of
exclusivity, John sees The Ultimate Collection as a range of five or
six garments spread across three tiers, which together represent an
inspirational fusion of art and craft.
While some of the finer details are yet to be worked out – including
the exact shape, form and structure of garments – John says there is
likely to be a handmade three-piece suit, blouson, silk trousers with
perhaps a smoking jacket and a top coat included in the mix.
As a man whose attention to detail is legendary – he has built into
his walking stick a vessel containing his aftershave and once made
a jacket for himself with space in the lapel to carry chopsticks - the
devil will of course be in the detail.
And to this end at least, the concept is well advanced.
“If you’re going to make a good cake you’ve got to have the best
flour, the best eggs the most pure water – if one of your ingredients
is wrong, your cake doesn’t turn out. Everything that goes into [the
collection] has to be the best I can obtain and use. It’s got to be
practical but an ultimate expression of that article,” he says.
18 carat gold hand engraved chain
Some of Cutler’s all important tools –
tailor’s wax, needle and thread, and thimble
T
o label it a dream would be doing it a great disservice yet to call
it a vision, even more so.
Because the concept that J.H Cutler's principal, John Cutler,
intends bringing to fruition is both of these things but also much,
much more. It is, for all intents and purposes, a legacy and one that
has been more than 50 years in the making.
John Handel Lawson Cutler was just a teenager when he was first
inducted into the family business started by his great grandfather,
Joseph Handel Cutler, in 1884. Having grown up in a household where
the important men in his life were always impeccably dressed, he
struggles to recall a time when any other vocation was considered.
The first piece of clothing he ever completed was a jerkin, a short
sleeveless men’s jacket lined with hand-stitched silk and constructed
from hide sourced by one of his classmates. Yet at just 15 and a half,
while his friends completed their schooling, John spent his mornings
at the coalface in the J.H Cutler workroom in Sydney, learning about
the intricacies of garment construction as well as the more mundane
tasks of bookkeeping and selling.
Shortly after, he left the safe confines of home to study at the
renowned, Tailor and Cutter Academy in London, before honing his
craft at the home of bespoke tailoring – Mayfair’s Savile Row. He was
just 27 years of age when named managing director of the family
business following the retirement of his father Bruce.
Today, John's reputation as a master tailor is so strongly forged among
the big end of town that everyone from the international social elite to
Australia’s best known politicians, entertainers, sports commentators
and legal professionals have his suits, shirts and trousers in their ever
expanding wardrobes.
Yet, as he first acknowledged 20 years ago, bespoke tailoring in the
truest sense is a dying art. For this reason, John still goes to great
lengths to ensure that he does the bulk of the contact work with all of
his clients.
“My grandfather used to say ‘you have to fit the mind just as much as
the body’. Half of my job is getting into people’s heads and trying to
understand what the commission is that they’re giving me.
“I can make something that is technically brilliant but if it doesn’t fit
the person’s mind, if it’s not what they want, it doesn’t matter how
good it is, they won’t be happy with it.”
Tailoring has provided John with more than just a place of work. It has
fulfilled a creative compulsion as well as provided him with an outlet
through which he has been able to indulge his passion for people – in
all their shapes and forms. Yet still he wants more.
For more than a decade now, John has harboured a desire to create a
small collection of clothing he sees as “the ultimate expression of a
tailor’s art form”.
The master at work
Australian opal buttons Pure silk lining

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Assistance for the collection has already been sought from many
quarters with a series of local and international artisans agreeing to
support him in turning his dream into reality.
In relying on relationships cultivated over many years, John has
been able to lean on suppliers to secure some of the world’s rarest
fabrications to use in the collection, including lightweight pure silk
velvet made by Parisian fabric weavers, Dormeuil Frere, with whom
J.H Cutler has been working with for 131 years. In addition, John
hopes to source a modern casual tweed from British supplier, Dashing
Tweeds. All thread used in the garment construction will be silk.
Long term J.H Cutler collaborator, John Thomson, has been engaged
to design and hand-make unique 18 carat gold hangers for each
garment in the collection, while John has been working with Sydney-
based illustrator, Edwina Buckley of Lollilu Textiles & Illustrations, to
design a unique peacock lining that will be a key signature of each
piece in the collection.
“The whole aesthetic concept for a peacock is that they open up to
show their glory. Women have got all the colour. So I’m turning it
around and saying ‘why can’t the man be the peacock and indulge in
a bit of colour.’
“I often encourage people to stretch the boundaries in the linings.
With linings you can do anything. If a groom is having his suit made
I tell him to keep it from the bride but to bring in some photos of her
or them as a couple and I can have those photos incorporated into
the lining. In its own special way, the lining of the suit then says ‘I’ve
always loved you’. Lining is very important.”
In addition, John has been in talks with jeweller, Justin Schwartz of
Quorra, on the concept of using jewels as buttons.
“[The idea behind it is to] have a decent sized button made from
encrusted jewels such as black diamonds, pearls or opals that are
backlit and appear as though they come from your soul.”
Designed for show and not for wear, the pieces that comprise The
Ultimate Collection will be presented in glass cabinets to enable
them to travel and be displayed in different locations – such as an
upmarket store, a museum, gallery or hotel foyer. John believes the
collection is unlikely ever to be put up for sale. But if forced to put a
value on it he considers it would sit around the $1 million mark.
To complete The Ultimate Collection offering, each piece will
come with its own book written and illustrated by long-term Cutler
collaborative partners, journalist David Dowsey and photographer
Richard Weinstein, detailing the intricacies of each garment’s
construction. The presentation will also be top notch with bespoke
furniture maker, David Boucher, already on board to craft a unique box
in which each book will appear.
The second stage of the project will see John produce a second
bespoke version, designed to be admired but also worn, that would
retail for around $200,000 in total.
A more commercial collection – dubbed The Gentleman’s Wardrobe,
with a price point of around $85,000 – would boast many of the same
elements as the main 'Ultimate' collection but more likely to appear in
the form of two formal suits, a casual suit, a dinner suit, a blazer and a
pair of trousers.
This version would be made the classic bespoke way and not by
hand, he says.
“I’m an artisan and artisans don’t make money. I don’t own anything.
I don’t own a house, I don’t own a car, I just live nicely. The Ultimate
Collection may be a way of using my experience, my abilities and my
dreams as superannuation. [However] it’s also a way of using my 51
years of experience in an ultimate sort of way.
“I could just retire, die out and go quietly. But that’s not me, I want to
make a statement and that statement has a lot to do with keeping the
bespoke and the pure process alive.”
Cutler was also responsible for coming up with
Richie Benaud’s cream Channel Nine coat.