Ozwald Boateng was born in 1967 in North London to Ghanaian parents. He studied computing at Southgate College, failed his first business launching a label at sixteen, and apprenticed himself to Savile Row tailors through his twenties. In 1995, at twenty-eight, he opened at No. 9 Vigo Street — the first new shop on the extended Savile Row in a century and the first ever run by a Black master tailor.

The Aesthetic

Boateng's argument, consistent across thirty years, is that British bespoke tailoring has drifted — at Anderson & Sheppard, Henry Poole, Gieves & Hawkes, and most of the row — into a monochromatic navy-and-grey conservatism. His own bespoke is cut to the tightest Savile Row silhouettes but in saturated royal blue, emerald, magenta, and blood red, with coloured silk linings that are deliberately visible when the jacket is open. The approach was, in 1995, called frivolous. By 2010 every house on the Row had added at least one brightly-lined bespoke jacket to its quiet book.

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A suit should arrive at a room thirty seconds before you do. — Ozwald Boateng

Givenchy

From March 2003 to October 2007, Boateng was creative director of Givenchy Menswear. He was the first Black designer appointed to a creative-director role at a Paris luxury house — sixteen years before Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton. The four years produced twelve men's collections. Boateng returned to his own house full-time in 2008.

The Clientele and the Activism

His private bespoke clients have included Barack Obama, Samuel L. Jackson, Will Smith, Idris Elba, Jamie Foxx, Daniel Craig, Giorgio Armani, and Paul McCartney. He was appointed OBE in 2006. His parallel philanthropic work, through the Made in Africa Foundation (founded 2010), has supported African infrastructure investment and a pan-African design education initiative.

Boateng continues to operate from his Savile Row shop. He is fifty-seven at the time of writing.