Ready-to-wear goes bespoke

Ready-to-wear heavyweights and luxury Houses such as Giorgio Armani, Jil Sander and Tom Ford are introducing fully hand-stitched, custom-made suits in a challenge to London 's renowned bespoke service. The target is a gent like George Clooney instead of Prince Charles.

Armani, Jil Sander and Ford hope to cater to richer clients in traditional markets and new wealth in emerging markets such as Russia , India and China . They are upping the ante with Savile Row by offering more hand-stitching, nontraditional styles and that other cachet: even loftier price tags, according to Bloomberg. ``There's a lot of pent-up demand for true luxury in many of these emerging, peacock-male societies,'' Ford says. ``The men are getting rich first, and they want to deck themselves out before they deck out their wives.''

Customers can order Armani's ``Fatto a Mano,'' or ``made-by- hand,'' service starting today. ``Jil Sander Sartorial'' will be available in November and is conceived by Raf Simons, a Belgian designer who says he creates for ``confident outsiders.'' Tom Ford's line will appear next spring at his first store, which will be on Madison Avenue in Manhattan . Delivery of the finished suit can take as little as three weeks for a Jil Sander.

``There is a male customer out there who is rich and demanding and who doesn't want a traditionally tailored suit or a Harris tweed,'' Armani told Bloomberg. ``We have the people, the know-how and the structure to give him what he wants.'' Armani is launching his Emporio Armani line in London this season, one of the

Several design houses, including Giorgio Armani SpA and Burberry Plc, have offered made-to-measure men's lines that allow customers to choose fabrics and suit styles from a limited selection, but production is at least partly in factories. The custom services being introduced by Armani, Jil Sander and Ford represent a new concept for the labels, promising fully hand- stitched production as well as personal attention available only in the designers' top stores.

Savile Row bespoke suits start at about £2,000 and take two to three months to make. They are made to last a lifetime, with very big ``inlays'' in case clients get broader. A trade group called Savile Row Bespoke, formed two years ago, has grown to 12 members. To define more clearly what constitutes a Savile Row bespoke suit, it is writing a code based on rules compiled by France's Federation de la Couture. The code-in-progress dictates that only suits fully hand-made, requiring 60 hours to make over a six to eight week period using 100 yards of Savile Row can be classified as bespoke.