JOURNALIST, CONSULTANT AND AUTHOR OF 'SHARP SUITS', ERIC MUSGRAVE KNOWS THE BUSINESS OF FASHION. PIONEER OF THE MEN'S STYLE MAGAZINE AND CONNOISSEUR OF FINE TAILORING, ERIC MUSGRAVE HAS RETURNED TO CATALOGUE THE RISE OF ONE OF FASHION'S MOST ICONIC SYMBOLS. THE MONTEBURY MET ERIC AT THE UNION CLUB IN SOHO TO DISCUSS DRAPERS, FHM, DAVID BOWIE AND SAVILE ROW.

Eric Musgrave: I was born in 1955 in Leeds, Yorkshire and was brought up there until I was eighteen. I was a product of a typical working class family of the time. I went to university in Hull where I did a history degree. I had no idea what I wanted to do - I wanted to be a teacher, and then I didn’t want to be a teacher, so I went to America in 1976 and had my best ever job - working on a fair ground. I came back to England in 1977 and needed a job. The only thing I could think of doing was to be a journalist. I had a false start working for a company called D.C. Thomson, the people who published the Beano and Dandy. I lasted five and a half months, and they gave me two weeks notice before my six month trial had ended. In 1979, I then went to work at the Butlins holiday centres as a press officer for the Summer, which was the only job I could get that was even vaguely connected to journalism. In 1980, I thought that I should try trade magazines. I have two older sisters and one of them was in the bridal wear business. She used to use a magazine called Drapers Record and I wrote to them because they were advertising for a junior reporter. I joined Drapers Record in January 1980 in Soho Square and I have been observing and commentating on the fashion business since then. I did two and a half years on Drapers Record and walked down the office in 1982 to start working with Men’s Wear magazine, which was a weekly. I was Deputy Editor there and I had been the News Editor on Drapers Record.

I did two years and was then headhunted to go and work with a guy called Chris Astridge, who was an entrepreneur who had a trade magazine called MAB News. MAB was the Menswear Association of Britain which was a small retailers association who had a bi annual trade exhibition. An MAB show happened in Earls Court in September and IMBEX happened at Olympia in February. Those were the two places where trade buyers came to see the new collections - long gone, long disappeared but were very important in that mid-eighties period.

Chris Astridge was a very important guy in my career because he correctly identified that the industry in the UK was not numerous enough to support a trade magazine, and the important thing was to get the information to the consumer and not to the trade. He said that we had to do a consumer magazine so in around Easter 1985, off the back of MAB News we launched a magazine aimed at the male consumer called For Him, which was one of the first modern men’s style magazines. There were one or two around, mainly London focused.

Very interestingly, Chris said that we had a problem. Number one, we were a very small company and none of the distributors such as WHSmith had heard of us. Also, presenting a fashion magazine for men, they didn’t know where to put us on the shelves. The magazines that were around were men’s magazines with women with their breasts out, fishing magazines, car magazines, and they were not going to deal with us because they didn’t know what to do with us. Because we were a trade magazine, we knew that there were hundreds of men’s shops around the UK that were selling clothes to men, so there was an interest from an active audience out there. Also, we knew that many men were interested in their appearance but didn’t want to admit they were, because they were worried that they would be classified as being gay. So therefore, Chris had this very good idea. He said that men were interested in the information but they were not confident enough to admit that they wanted this information. They were also not confident enough to pay for this information. So he hit on an excellent formula to distribute ‘For Him’ only through menswear shops, not through news agents and it had no cover price. Therefore, the consumer didn’t have to pay for it, which meant that he didn’t have to admit to himself or anyone else that he was that interested in style. In Easter 1985 we distributed about 100,000 copies of ‘For Him’ solely through menswear shops with no cover price, which is how what is now FHM, got started. We vaguely modeled ourselves on the American Esquire of the 1960s and we wanted to be a style guide for men. We were only twice a year, so I did the first three issues and then I went abroad to Holland. In Holland I worked for an international textile magazine called ‘International Textiles’ and then I came back to England in 1987 and ended up being the Editor of Fashion Weekly, which was a small almost maverick publication, whose biggest rivals were Drapers Record and Men’s Wear, whom I used to work for. I did such a good job that in 1988 Men’s Wear and Drapers Record came and bought Fashion Weekly. I didn’t want to go back to work for Men’s Wear and Draper’s Record because I found them a bit dull but I ended up for the whole of 1990 back at For Him, which at that stage was six times a year.

EM: Not really because For Him never had any money and we were always flying by the seat of our pants and also Chris, who I have a lot of admiration and gratitude for, really wanted to be Editor. He was the publisher and interfered to a degree which I found unacceptable so we parted on good terms, but I left them to it.

IT IS INTERESTING THAT YOU MENTION THAT THE MAGAZINE DID NOT HAVE ANY MONEY. WHAT WAS THE INTEREST FROM BRANDS LIKE AT THE TIME?

EM: Because we had a trade magazine, we were very well connected with what I call the mainstream middle market. Where we had the aspiration, which was never fulfilled, was to get to the next level to what we would now call the designer market. I remember being very frustrated because (my memory says it was Emporio Armani but it might not have been) at Emporio Armani we went to see whoever was responsible for buying the advertising space. My policy as the Editor of For Him was to make sure that it had a very broad appeal and I remember Chris coming back (he sold the advertising) saying that he had been to see the agency and they said that we were too broad and they wanted it much narrower. I thought this was a load of nonsense because if you go to the Emporio Armani shop on a Saturday morning, you find black guys wearing Arsenal shirts going to buy a hat, bags or t-shirts - it has a huge appeal. These were the sort of guys we were targeting with For Him. These were the sort of commercial problems we came up against and I knew that if Emporio Armani had chosen to advertise in For Him, they would have been reaching a receptive audience.

We started in Spring 1985, Arena started in Autumn 1986 and I left second time around at the end of 1990, just before Esquire started. What we had was big international companies coming into the business at this time. Also, the name For Him, which I am not proud of at all, is a dreadful name. It was a translation of Per Lui, which was a very fashionable Italian magazine of the time. It sounds fantastic in Italian but not so in English. So, when we started, we would phone people up and say “hello, I am from For Him”. Now, at the time there were two magazines on the market, one was called Him which was a very, very gay magazine and there was another called Forum which was filled with letters about sex. So, when you telephoned people they would say “are you calling me from Forum?”, or “Him!?”, and so we began saying it was ‘For Him Magazine’ in very spaced out syllables. At the time, other magazines such as the music magazine Q were launching, and For Him Magazine doesn’t look too good graphically and was very difficult to say on the phone so we started to think about condensing the name. I remember talking about this internally since 1990 and we suggested calling it FHM, at which one of our less far sighted colleagues said “What, you mean Fucking Horrible Magazine?”.

At the end of 1990, I said that it was time for me to go, so I departed. Sometime after, Chris did a deal with EMAP and they bought the magazine. When I was at For Him, as an independent title, the best we ever got was about 55,000 copies, which was six times a year. When EMAP bought it and Mike Soutar and his team turned it into the lad’s mag I think it almost hit one million on one of its issues.

Above: In the latest Bond movie Quantum of Solace (2008). Daniel Craig projects a darker, more brutal image than any of the predecessors, but still remains well dressed, thanks to Tom Ford's tailoring. © SHARP SUITS by Eric Musgrave, published by PAVILION.

Left: A 1962 double-breasted suit with peaked lapels is personalised with covered buttons, satin-trimmed turn-back cuffs and, surprisingly, a waistcoat. © SHARP SUITS by Eric Musgrave, published by PAVILION.

EM: I was much happier in the business to business side than in the consumer side, I felt that there were far too many compromises. After I left FHM I did a lot of freelance work, such as working for what would now be called German GQ. That was a proper consumer magazine where you were told that Giorgio Armani had taken 35 pages of advertising for the year so we had to pay them back with 35 pages of editorial. You couldn’t mix an Armani suit with a Versace shirt, it had to be totally Armani. Nobody goes and dresses head to foot in Armani, nobody with any imagination anyway. I felt uncomfortable about it and so I was very happy to go back into the trade magazine world, which was where I was until 2006. I then was responsible for merging Drapers Record and Menswear into what became Drapers in 2002. In 2006 I was waiting to be promoted, but they gave the job to somebody else, so that was when I decided to go. Since then I have been a freelance consultant and journalist.

WHAT IS YOUR OPINION ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEN’S MAGAZINE OVER THE YEARS AND WHAT IMPACT DO YOU THINK IT HAS HAD ON MEN’S FASHION?

EM: I think men are much more informed now, leaving aside the internet. I used to think as a guy writing about the menswear business, if I were not in the menswear business, how would I know so much about menswear? Friends of mine who were not in the menswear business had no forum to learn about menswear, and most guys do not have any knowledge of how to dress well and what goes into clothes. I think guys are now much better informed but not as well informed as they could be. All magazines and publishing is a business and you have to go where the money is, and it is impossible for a magazine to say that it doesn’t care about its advertisers. I find that the successful magazines are very formulaic and you rarely see anything in the magazine that is not about an advertiser. There are hundreds of brands out there that do not have a PR and do not have anybody pushing them to the magazines and they have a perfectly reasonable business but they never get any publicity. This is because journalists are lazy, and the power of the PR network has become much stronger. I believe that journalists have lost the curiosity of going out and wanting to find something that nobody else knows about. I think most of the big magazines, to a degree, shortchange their readers. The printed media is too London-centric and it is all a bit predictable.

EM: The subject of men’s suits could have been done five years ago or five years in the future, because the suit is an iconic central piece in the wardrobe of many men.

DO YOU THINK MEN HAVE LOST THEIR WAY WHEN IT COMES TO TRADITIONAL SUITING?

EM: No, I would say some men have never had their way. I think some men make the decision that they don’t like suits and just go around in sportswear, and good luck to them. I think some people wear a suit because they have to, so they go along to Asda or Tesco and buy a polyester suit for £30, and they will be happy with it. Moving to the other end of the spectrum, there are people who want to wear a suit and want to make it individual. It is quite interesting to see who are really good suit models at the moment. I think Mark Ronson is a really good suit model and when I was looking for someone for my book, I settled on David Bowie because he is rarely seen on and off the stage out of a suit. When I looked back, he has actually been wearing suits for most of his career. I did look at David Beckham, and I looked long and hard for a decent picture of him in a suit and I couldn’t find one. I think he tries too hard. At the back of the book there is a timeline and my brief was to find one picture that summarised that decade. For 2000 I decided to use Cristiano Ronaldo, and the point I was trying to make there was that these days, male icons are movie stars, sportsman or musicians.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE DECADE?

EM: My favourite decade for a number of reasons is probably the 1960s. The reasons for that is that a defined watershed in attitudes to menswear came after the Second World War. After the Second World War, because of the extraordinary circumstances of a world war, the pre-war order was no longer there. Through the 50s, you had the beginning of a change in social attitudes, where the working class were not so far away from the upper class. The working class also became more confident and less subservient. I think the real flowering of the post Second World War period came in the 1960s. There was no longer uniformity, but knowing that most men don’t want to be that individual, more part of a tribe, you had groups with extremely strict rules, such as the Mods.

HOW MANY SUITS DO YOU OWN AND WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE?

EM: I think when I added them up I had eleven suits, which is probably enough. I was in a very fortunate position where I was virtually given a lot of suits. I have never been in the financial position where I could go and have a suit made on Savile Row, but if I had the money, I would. Personally, I think that paying £4000 for a handmade Savile Row suit is good value, because it will last about thirty five years.

Above: By 1975 Italian designers like Carlo Palazzi were setting the international pace with their body-conscious suits which displayed wide lapels and wider flares. © SHARP SUITS by Eric Musgrave, published by PAVILION.

© SHARP SUITS by Eric Musgrave will be published in October by PAVILION, an imprint of ANOVA BOOKS.

For more information on Eric Musgrave, please visit www.ericmusgrave.co.uk.

EM: Either not trying hard enough or trying too hard. I think guys are badly served by the retail staff who are not trained well enough to know what is right for the body. Usually the suit is too big and the sleeve is hanging down near the knuckle, which is just terrible. I think the problem is that guys don’t have enough knowledge before they go in, so they can’t have a detailed conversation with the sale staff. One of the chapters in the book is a chapter called ‘a question of balance’ and it is all about what makes a good suit. It is very hard to put down on paper what makes a good suit, but when you look at it, you know it is right. When I was researching this and I spoke to people about it, they said that the one thing about a suit is that it has to balance. The jacket has got to compliment the trousers and the whole thing has to compliment the body type. It is almost impossible to go and buy an off the peg suit that will fit you perfectly, you have to take it to be altered.

WHAT BRANDS/DESIGNERS ARE YOU MOST INTERESTED IN AT THE MOMENT?

EM: Well, bearing in mind that I have eleven suits and I don’t wear suits very often, I don’t need to buy anymore. I think before I die, I would like to have the experience of having a proper suit made on Savile Row. I possibly know a little too much about the industry to be won over by a particular designer, and I struggle to think of anybody that is truly innovative. If you want individuality as a man, you have got to have a clear image of yourself. I think my book shows that when people try very hard to do something different, it is a bit of fun for the time but looking back a few years later, you think “What?”.

HOW DO YOU SEE MENSWEAR DEVELOPING IN THE FUTURE?

EM: I think that the suit as we know it is going to be an island in an ocean of casual wear, and the island will continue to get smaller. This is because there are huge numbers of people growing up who have never had a suit, never had the desire to wear a suit and never had the need to wear a suit. Once again I have every confidence that the consumer will decide and I don’t think there is anything out there that nobody has discovered yet. People I know, who are now in their 70s and used to work as salesman in the menswear business say that the owner of a shop wouldn’t even see you if you were not wearing a hat, which we now see as something medieval.