Tonight:
5°c
Harold Tillman compliments the Evening Standard.
"I want to thank the Evening Standard for bringing the issue [of underweight models] to everyone's attention."
I look at him intently. I swear his teeth aren't gritted. They have every reason to be. Earlier this week, this paper took a doctor along to the fashion show of Jaeger, the label he owns, to check on the models. None of them appeared to be above a size eight.
For Tillman, the disclosure was doubly embarrassing. He also chairs the British Fashion Council, which is trying to promote the use of healthier models. This is London Fashion Week, his big week, but no sooner does it commence than the size zero row kicks off again and as chairman he's on the receiving end.
He's annoyed, he says, that the Evening Standard didn't send a doctor along to every catwalk show (there are 57 in total). The Jaeger models, he says, were thin because the collection they were showing was aimed at the much younger woman and, despite their size, their health was fine.
Tillman does not shirk the debate. He believes passionately that the models' well-being is the key. And he also feels part of the solution could lie with the original supermodels, the Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista generation, none of whom are malnourished. "If I have a personal regret it's that these supermodels are not more involved - they are role models and all the girls look up to them."
Neither is he avoiding the controversy that also hits the industry from time to time, of companies employing cheap labour. "Fashion around the world is a £500 billion a year business. It employs 30 million people, from fabric-weaving to designing to garment manufacturing and retailing. Money is driven towards those countries from the fashion capitals of the world like London that would not otherwise go there. Even if the money is small, it still helps to improve the quality of life in those places."
He pauses. "Don't get me wrong - I'm not in favour of driving prices down.
And I don't come from the sweatshop end of the industry myself. I'm a Savile Row tailor by profession and now I own Jaeger - I've always believed in quality."
Outside the rag trade, few have heard of Tillman. He's not a designer like Paul Smith or Alexander McQueen. Neither is he as famous a retailer as his close friends Philip Green and Stuart Rose. Inside, though, Tillman is very well known indeed.
As well as Jaeger, he owns Allders, the Croydon department store and the Taman Gang restaurant. He's also coowner of Harry Morgans, the New Yorkstyle deli chain, the Ebury and the Notting Hill Brasserie. On top of that, he chairs, and is an investor in, Lord Coe's sports marketing operation, Complete Leisure Group. (Coe is a friend and Tillman used to run in his youth).
He's a formidable networker, charming and courteous to a degree that is unnerving. Tall and thin, he looks fit for his 62 years (he still works out in the gym). He's wearing a chalk pinstripe, grey silk tie, brilliant white shirt and silver cufflinks. In his breast pocket, is a crisply folded white handkerchief. His silver hair is swept back and his face is tanned - the result of spending time at his home in Spain. He manages to achieve the impossible: making Stuart Rose, his predecessor as Fashion Council chair, look scruffy.
Why's he doing this? Why take on a role that has become something of a poisoned chalice? "Stuart Rose put a gun to my head. No, I'm just joking. Genuinely, I've created a fund at the London College of Fashion and I'm chairing the board of the alumni of the University of Arts [it covers the six design colleges in London]. Stuart said, 'My time at the Fashion Council is coming to an end; you're involved with design and designers, do you want to take it on?'"
Adds Tillman: "It blends in with everything I'm doing, because I like to think I'm a bit of a retailer as well, with Jaeger, which is at the premium end of the market."
He grew up in Brixton, just off Brixton Hill. His father was a tailor, his mother a milliner. They moved to Streatham, then to Wimbledon and he went to Balham County Grammar. South London was his stampingground, but these days he lives north of the river. "My wife is a north Londoner and I had to concede and move to Highgate when I married her." (She's called Stephanie, they've been married 39 years and they've got two children, Mitchell and Meredith).
His father's health was not good, the result of a war injury. Tillman was looking after the family books and learning about business while his friends were kicking balls. He left school at 15 and studied to be an accountant - "that was worthwhile, it taught me how to read a balance sheet" - before becoming one of the first male students at the London College of Fashion.
Aged 19, he became an apprentice at Lincroft Kilgour in Savile Row. Three years later, he was its managing-director. Two years after that, aged 24, he floated Lincrofts on the stock market. By the time he was 30 he was a multimillionaire.
His trick was clever marketing and good design - he spotted a young talent called Paul Smith, and he was one of the first to realise the power of celebrity and used George Best to promote his clothes. He sold out of Lincrofts and went into bars - he saw a cocktail bar in New York and brought the idea to London, opening the iconic Rumours in Covent Garden.
It wasn't all plain sailing. He almost came a total cropper with the collapse of Honorbilt in 1990. He'd bought the company from Austin Reed and floated it. Soon afterwards, he made two acquisitions in Hong Kong and California. Unknown to him, Honorbilt was a turkey and the group started to unravel. "I hadn't done my due diligence properly. I was to blame," he says.
While Tillman was flying round the world doing deals, his colleagues had not maintained proper checks and controls. The situation spiralled and eventually, after Honorbilt was refused further bank funding, he called in the receiver. The Department of Trade and Industry sent the inspectors in and it was touch-and-go whether he would be banned as a director. Eventually, he persuaded them to bar him for three years.
Still, it was a shattering experience. "I was virtually wiped out financially. I kept my house by my fingernails," he says. "But it taught me a valuable lesson. Now I keep in close touch with everything I do, and if I buy anything I always do due diligence."
His story is almost an echo of his pal Green's. The Topshop billionaire took over the family finances when his father died, and he too had a spectacular company failure. Both men pay enormous attention to detail and both have an unerring feel for what women will wear. They can also spin numbers in their heads.
Tillman turned his back on fashion retailing. "I feared, because of what had happened, my reputation would be shattered." Through "good luck" he rebuilt his fortune, opening bars in Camden and Soho, and selling them for a tidy profit. He was headhunted to go to Germany to help save a department store chain. "I could speak German and the headhunter said they needed someone who had been involved in failure to help turn it round."
AFTER two and a half years there, an opportunity arose to acquire the menswear division of William Baird, the clothing group (it's the largest supplier of men's suits in the UK). It was losing £19 million a year. He took it over and sold it four years later for an undisclosed sum. He's also turned round Allders, the third-largest department store in the country after Harrods and Selfridges, and, of course, Jaeger.
The venerable brand - it's 125 next year - was sinking fast when he took it off the hands of Richard Thompson, the then Queen's Park Rangers owner, for just £1 in 2003. To keep it alive, Tillman had to inject £10 million of working capital immediately.
Since then, he's invested further tens of millions. But the result has been a triumph - Jaeger has gone from losing £3 million a year to clearing more than £15 million. It's got 144 UK shops, has expanded overseas and has the potential to become another Burberry - except it's not hamstrung by having to sell trenchcoats or a trademark check.
His coup was recruiting Belinda Earl, ex of Debenhams, M&S and Harrods. He gave her 20% of the business. She's a very creative, design-led retailer." He laughs. "She keeps saying to me, 'you won't sell it, will you?'" His eyes are sparkling. He's loving every minute - Jaeger, the Fashion Council. Even with the size zero furore.
