Gloves Fit for a Queen, With Hands-On Craftsmanship (Published 2014) – The New York Times

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By Susanne Fowler
LEWES, ENGLAND — It is an iconic image: Queen Elizabeth in her royal carriage, gently waving a graceful gloved hand.
Few of us can live like a queen, but we can wear that glove.
Or the pure merino wool pair worn by the duchess of Cambridge, or the singer Rihanna’s long French lace ones, or even the opera-length satin sheaths that set off Lady Mary’s gowns in “Downton Abbey.”
Each of these gloves was sewn in a converted cowshed on a farm in East Sussex, under the direction of the willowy Genevieve James.
Her gloves are not heavy workaday leathers for bracing against the harsher elements but elegant accessories for women willing to pay, say, 360 pounds, or $570, for the added panache of a pair of full-length pure-wool gloves cuffed with silver fox fur.
As design director of Cornelia James, the company founded by her mother in London in 1946, Ms. James is working to keep the British glove-making heritage alive and to expand to a broader international market.
“Mum was great,” Ms. James said over a steaming cup of milky tea in the atelier, as sheep grazed outside. “She was an Austrian Jewish refugee who had to get out very quickly from Vienna in 1939.
“But mother had just finished studying fashion design at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, coincidentally the same college that turned down Hitler. So she came eventually to England with a suitcase full of the colored leather that she had been using to make things.”
War was starting and while people had no money to buy couture clothing, Ms. James said, they could afford a handbag or gloves. Her mother survived the war years making and selling those.
Her breakthrough came after the war. She caught the attention of the royal couturier Norman Hartnell, who was designing Princess Elizabeth’s dress for her marriage in 1947 to Lt. Philip Mountbatten.
“My mother was invited to design all of the gloves for her trousseau,” Ms. James said. “Unlike these days, when you went on your honeymoon on the royal yacht you needed several pairs of gloves. This was really the start of her association with the royal family.”
Decades later, in 1979, the business was awarded a royal warrant, the mark of recognition for suppliers to the monarchy.
Cornelia James died in 1999 at age 82. In the 1950s, at the peak of her long career, she had 250 workers under her wing in a former dairy in Brighton.
But the popularity of gloves as a fashion accessory waned and the business now has just three sewers, known as machinists, working in tandem with Ms. James and her husband, Andrew Lawson. Mr. Lawson measures and cuts the fabric in the atelier, where bolts of fine wool lean against the walls and bobbins of colorful thread occupy rows of shelves under bright overhead lights.
Here they make bridal gloves of lace, cotton, duchess satin or silk that sell for £130; stylish cotton race-day gloves for the Ascot set (up to £130); and fine wool pairs of the type a royal might wear to a ribbon-cutting event (up to £155). There’s also a cotton “Camilla” glove in a black and white yin-yang pattern (£110) and a taupe merino wool “Beatrice” with a demure bow atop the wrist (£70).
Evening gloves can be opera length and lacy (£66), in fine netting (£100), or duchess satin trimmed with Swarovski crystals for the red carpet (£130).
For more practical wear, a line of colorful cashmere gloves, made from best-quality yarn and knitted in Scotland, sells for £65. There is also a newer line of Italian-made nappa leatherski gloves and deerskin mittens (£260 a pair), lined in possum fur.
While members of the royal family are appreciative and loyal customers, Mr. Lawson says, the company cannot depend solely on the queen.
“The queen is very, very, very cost conscious,” he said, clearly trying not to cross a line by saying so. “And our gloves are obviously quite expensive. So she will send them back to be repaired if they lose a stitch. One year she might have 20 pairs and the next year none, and the next year 15. And she never loses them, which is why most people order new gloves. She’s still wearing certain gloves of ours that we made 15 years ago.”
With two stylish ridges, known as points, and measuring five inches from the base of the thumb up the arm, the queen’s made-to-measure design sells for £110. The white gloves are washable, a relief for someone who shakes so many hands.
“Yes, she insists on that,” Mr. Lawson said. “It’s one of the reasons she wears fabric gloves rather than leather. When she goes on a trip she’ll have two or three or four pairs because she’s shaking all these hands.”
The product that emerges from this bucolic country workshop can’t compete in sheer numbers with the mass production coming out of Asia, but Mr. Lawson says the brand has a distinctive appeal, even in a country like China.
“We’re never going to compete on price, so we try to do better on quality and integrity of the design,” he said. “In particular, the Chinese are coming to realize more and more that fashion is not just about the big brands that everybody’s got.”
“To them we are their best-kept secret — ‘only I know about Cornelia James and I want to keep it to myself’ — which is nice in some ways, but obviously we’d like for hundreds of millions of Chinese people to be buying our gloves,” he said with a chuckle.
The brand sells “very well in Japan,” Ms. James said, “because we tick all the boxes there: They love the heritage, they love the story, they like a really beautifully made, small product with detail. Japan is our most important customer.”
“Where we’d really like to sell in is the States,” she added. But the changing structure of the retail sector, which is turning many of the once-grand department stores into boutique concession stands, has made it more difficult to interest American store buyers in smaller-margin luxury gloves, she said.
Meanwhile, the value of the royal warrant has been incalculable.
“It’s a real door opener,” Mr. Lawson said. “Everyone knows it stands for excellence and quality in what you are doing. And you can’t buy it at any price. It has to be given to you.”
And while the company does make flashy lime-green-and-fuschia items for stage shows like “Mamma Mia,” many of its products are simply, subtly beautiful.
It’s a mark of their class that all but the ski gloves, for example, have no external label or logo.
“We have a lot of customers who don’t want the branding, who don’t want the showiness,” Mr. Lawson said. “They just want a nice pair of gloves.”
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