Your Own Pattern
Drafted from your measurements, not adjusted from a stock size. It is kept on file, so your next garment of the same kind starts from it.
The Bespoke Experience
What Bespoke Means Here
The word gets used loosely. Here it means three things: a pattern drafted for you alone, a toile fitted before your cloth is cut, and a garment made entirely by hand.
Three Things That Make It Bespoke
A Toile First
A test garment in plain cloth, fitted on you, so corrections are made to the pattern rather than to your cloth.
Made Fully By Hand
Every garment, every time. There is no part-handmade tier and no made-to-measure.
The Process
Ten To Twelve Weeks, From First Measure To Final Fitting
I
Consultation
90 minutes, at 528 Chapel Street.
We talk about the occasion, how you live and what the garment needs to do for you. Then we choose your cloth, design the garment together, and take your measurements.
Your toile is ready about three weeks later.
II
Toile Fitting
Your test garment, cut from your own pattern in plain cloth, is fitted and corrected on you. We mark where it pulls and where it pools, and your pattern is adjusted before your cloth is cut. Occasionally a difficult fit calls for a second toile.
III
Making
Your cloth is cut to the corrected pattern and the garment is made entirely by hand. A suit takes over fifty hours.
Your finished garment arrives about five weeks after the toile fitting.
IV
Final Fitting
Your finished garment, on you for the first time. Any last refinements are marked here.
Refinements take up to two weeks.
V
Collection
Refinements made, the garment pressed, and it goes home with you.
After your first commission, your pattern is on file, so every commission after it is quicker.
A garment you haven’t had made before, a waistcoat or an overcoat, say, begins with its own toile.
House style
English Convention, Cut To The Person
Savile Row is the reference point: the conventions of English tailoring, kept to without fuss, so the clothes look right now and in ten years’ time.
The house cut is soft and natural through the shoulder, built on a lighter canvas, so that you wear the suit, and the suit never wears you. The waist is suppressed to give shape, the button stance sits a little low, and the lapel carries a touch more width, for weight and balance. Trousers sit at a slightly higher rise, which lengthens the leg, wherever it suits the wearer.
We steer away from very thin lapels and from clothes cut too tight or too loose. The aim is a garment you will still reach for in years to come.
The workshop
Made By Hand, To A Savile Row Standard
Every garment is made fully by hand, over fifty hours of work for a suit, in a workshop that shares its ownership with a Savile Row house. Its tailors are trained over months by Savile Row tailors.
Your pattern is drafted and held by a Savile Row-trained patternmaker. After each fitting, Mark reviews the photographs with them before your garment goes any further.
The house
Mark Grasso
Mark Anthony Bespoke is Mark Grasso’s house. He takes every measurement, leads every fitting, and is the person who guides you from the first conversation to collection.
“I’ve loved menswear for as long as I can remember. Over time, that love grew into an appreciation for craftsmanship: for things made slowly, carefully and by hand. When I found bespoke, I found the place where the two meet, and I knew it was where I belonged.
Every commission begins with a conversation. Before we talk about cloth or cut, I want to understand how you live, where you’re going, and what a garment needs to be for you. You should never have to fuss with your clothing. Your garments should move with you, not the other way around.
I’m the youngest of five boys, raised by two parents who have always believed in me. My wife builds on that support and pushes me to be great, even when I told her, a couple of months before our wedding, that I wanted to take a leap of faith and open a house of my own.
I opened Mark Anthony Bespoke to honor a tradition and to help keep this craft alive. New Haven felt like the right home for it: a city with a long history of its own, and one I believe has its best years ahead.”