If you tried ranking “hard nuts to crack”, London’s tailoring clientele would likely earn a podium finish. Gaining respect can be a particularly chilly prospect for newcomer brands, which tend to get overlooked in favour of storied (and often rather stodgy) names with Royal Warrants to match. This makes the success of P Johnson all the more impressive. For its breezy, modern take on suiting, the Australian brand – which opened its first London store in 2016 – has achieved industry plaudits, commercial success and gained a loyal cadre of menswear editors among its many fans.
“It was intimidating at first,” says Patrick Johnson, its founder. “But I think a slice of the Australian attitude is really disarming.” And how! Over the past decade, the brand’s customer base has expanded enough to warrant a relocation from a modest showroom in Fitzrovia to a roomy new store on Old Burlington Street, which opened in late January. “We can really stretch our legs,” Patrick says. “I’m proud of what we created in those dinky digs, but we were bursting at the seams. We needed more space to create a comfortable experience.”
The new store does away with the clutter and clichés of a typical Mayfair tailor’s shop in favour of a more playfully eclectic style. White walls and a stripped-back layout are countervailed by antique furniture, abstract artwork, vintage tapestries, Chinese ceramics and leopard-print changing-room floors. Yet a sense of airiness prevails, thanks in no small part to the store’s generous square footage. Patrick’s wife, Tamsin Johnson – a noted interior designer – took on the project, in keeping with the brand’s other showrooms in Australia, Southeast Asia and the US. The London store, she says, is “freeing, and a great opportunity to do something less expected”.
Opening in Mayfair is an opportunity that extends beyond the interiors: Patrick now has the space to crystallise his point of view as a tailor and menswear designer, complementing his made-to-measure service with a broader selection of ready-to-wear pieces that can be bought off the rack. “We can really bring the whole wardrobe into frame,” he says. “The client can expect more from us now.”
The result is a pleasing mishmash of classic and cool. Lightly structured raincoats, collarless denim worker jackets and corduroy sport coats sit comfortably alongside the relaxed suiting his followers already know. The curation straddles the youthful, contemporary approach of brands like Drake’s with the refined, elegant sensibility of European tailoring houses. “It’s less about formal, classic, casual,” Patrick says, “and more about a generally stylish purview when it comes to dressing. It’s ‘how to wear what’, rather than simply ‘what to wear’.”
To that end, the store has been conceived as a hangout space as much as a retail operation, and Patrick hopes it’ll attract old friends and new fans of the brand, even if just to loiter with intent. “We always endeavour to slow people down,” he says. “It isn’t just about shopping.”
