[Hanne]

text and images from telegraph.co.uk 05/2002

Happy hunting on the evergreen catwalk

NESTLING in a narrow, leafy street around the corner from South Kensington underground station is the oldest surviving British couture house. Today, the heavy lace curtains, which normally keep Lachasse hidden from the prying eyes of schoolchildren en route to the Natural History Museum, twitch furiously.

It is the morning of the biannual show, and customers - ladies of a certain age, sporting camel coats and set hair - are streaming into 29 Thurloe Place from their chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces.
To these ladies, Lachasse is an institution, not a fashion house. It has been providing them and their predecessors with suits, frocks, trousseaus, bridal gowns and eveningwear for generations - since 1926, in fact.
The last customer count was in excess, globally, of 5,000. Today, you couldn't cram another coiffed woman into the rows of tiny, gilt chairs in the magnolia showroom and there's another show at 3pm. The room falls silent on the stroke of 11.30am, when a pocket-sized man in a suit leaps up and starts to reel off numbers and names.
This is Peter Lewis-Crown, sole designer/owner of Lachasse, and the same Mr Lewis-Crown who once taught tailoring at St Martins. As he announces the first suit - "Ahoy! A nautical suit in blue cotton" - ladies peer over bifocals, scrutinising the cloth, the hemline and the model. They keep this up until all 39 impeccably tailored skirts, jackets and dresses, teamed with Ascot hats or chinchilla scarves, have sashayed past. Then, with a peck on the anxious designer's cheek, they vanish. But, despite the lack of razzmatazz you usually find at a catwalk event, you can tell they'll be back - to buy.
Every designer has a favourite time of day, and, for Mr Lewis-Crown, it's clearly after dark. The eveningwear has gone down well, as have Lachasse's signature horizontal stripes, which are also enjoying a revival on the high street. But that is where any similarity between this ancient fashion house and, say, Topshop ends.

"This is about tailored, well-made clothes which flatter women and make them feel confident," says Mr Lewis-Crown, who tells me the word Lachasse comes from the French for "the hunt". "All women's fashion comes from the hunting field - wrapover skirts, frills on cuffs, cuffs on jackets and trousers. We're big on all of these." This season, they're particularly big on culottes and slim-fitting pencil skirts that fan out just below the knee. "We dress women aged from 26 to 100. They tend to disappear for a few years when they have children, then they're back and even fussier."
Lachasse has endured some change recently, however. Although 70 per cent of the business remains couture, with suits costing about £1,800 and ballgowns around £2,000, Mr Lewis-Crown now buys in a ready-to-wear line.
"I visit wholesale houses and whizz through like a tornado. I go for colour, texture and shape. I'm always having to chop off buttons. My taste is plain, plain, plain," he says. "I never pay any attention to other designers. Nor do our customers [who include Baroness Betty Boothroyd, Susan Hampshire and Mo Mowlam]."
Could the same client who shops at Galliano, one of Mr Lewis-Crown's ex-students, buy Lachasse? "Goodness me, yes. We dress all sorts. County, aristocracy, barristers, housewives, debutantes. We've just had a young girl come in and order a dress her grandmother wore as a debutante. Fashion goes in cycles. I think it's only a matter of time before there will be a move back to `dressmakers'."

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