About

A man in a long overcoat descending the steps of a ministry building at night, seen from behind, a car waiting at the kerb. — Illustration commissioned for The Chancery. No photographs of this work appear on this site, and there is a reason for that further down the page.

The Chancery is a collection of Italian, French and English tailoring, assembled one piece at a time by somebody who buys this clothing for himself and has done for a long while. Everything here was chosen. Nothing here was sourced in bulk, and nothing arrives because a lot came up cheap.

How I came to it

I trained as a lawyer and spent the first part of my working life in business law, which is a trade that teaches you to read a document for what it says rather than for what it would like you to believe. I moved into diplomacy some years ago and have worked in it since. The clothes came with the job, and I mean that literally.

A career spent between Rome, Paris, Naples, London, Geneva and New York is a career spent in fitting rooms, on waiting lists, and in a profession where people are paid to notice things and generally do. I learned to buy properly because the work required it. I kept going long after that because I'd started to enjoy it, which is how most obsessions begin.

A boardroom at dusk, figures around a long walnut table, one man standing at the window with his back to the room.

Twenty years of that leaves you with a wardrobe considerably larger than one man needs, in sizes that no longer all agree with him, and it leaves you with an eye. You stop reading labels somewhere along the way and start reading shoulders, and once that switch has flipped you can't flip it back. You walk into a room and see, without meaning to, that the man by the window is wearing something cut in Naples and the man beside him is wearing something very expensive that was cut nowhere in particular.

The Chancery is what I built with the eye, out of the wardrobe.

Why there's no name on this

I don't publish my name here and I don't intend to. The reason is administrative rather than mysterious: my employer takes an interest in what its people do outside the building, and the rooms my work takes me through belong to other people. I don't post photographs of them either. Anyone who does isn't in them.

What's left to judge me on is the clothes, which is the right thing to be judged on.

An international assembly chamber seen from the back of the hall, tiered desks of delegates curving toward a marble podium.

What gets in

The archive began as that wardrobe. Most of what joins it now comes from other men's wardrobes, on consignment, from Paris, Zurich, Geneva, Frankfurt and further afield, with the occasional estate and the occasional retailer closing stock. We are an independent dealer with no relationship to any house whose work we handle, no supply from them and no arrangement of any kind. When you see a house named on this site it's describing a garment, the way you'd describe a book by its publisher.

Beyond that the rule is simple enough to state and hard to keep: we list only a piece we would be happy to wear ourselves if it were our size. That disqualifies a great deal: the merely expensive, most of what carries a famous name and nothing else, and anything we can't work out. If we can't tell you what a garment is, we won't sell it to you.

What survives tends to have something specific about it. A shoulder you can identify across a room. A cloth from a bolt that no longer exists. A make that took somebody twenty-five hours and shows it in places the first owner never looked. Those are the pieces we go after, and they're the reason this is a small shop rather than a large one.

A state gala dinner in a mirrored hall, guests in white tie along a long candlelit table. — Evening clothes are the part of a wardrobe most often bought once and worn twice. It's why so much of what reaches an archive in this category is dinner tailoring in remarkable condition.

Measuring and grading

Everything here is measured by hand, laid flat, and written up with its faults named and photographed. We grade condition on a published six-tier scale and apply it the same way to a Kiton and to a jacket we paid very little for.

We would rather not dress any of that up as though it were what makes the shop interesting. You should be able to take it for granted that a dealer tells you where the shine is, and the fact that most of this trade doesn't says more about the trade than about us. The full method is on Our Standards and How We Measure.

If you have something to sell

We take tailoring on consignment from anywhere in Europe, and from further afield on request: you keep 60 to 80 per cent of the sale price and we do the rest, to the same standard as our own pieces. The terms, the cities we collect in and a short form are on the consignment page. For some pieces we would rather buy outright, and if so we will say so. Send photographs of the label, the interior, the shoulder and anything wrong with it, plus a chest and a shoulder measurement. We'll tell you quickly if it isn't for us, and we'll tell you why.

Write to us either way. If you're trying to work out whether something here will fit you, the fastest route is to measure a jacket that already does, flat, and send us those numbers. We answer within two working days, in English, French or German, and we'd rather talk you out of a piece than sell you the wrong one. Contact.