Lance Richardson’s splendidly readable and gossipy account of his life has a trump card to play—namely the relationship between Tommy and his photographer brother, David, who acted as a kind of artistic Boswell to his brother’s sartorial Johnson. Tommy died in 1992 of an AIDS-related illness, but David is still alive, and his cooperation enhances a gripping read that is as much social history as it is biography ... A lesser writer might have made the story of his downfall depressing, but Richardson has an eye for telling and hilarious details ... a fine match of author and subject. He writes with flair and erudition, making extensive use of interviews with David, and bringing something new to the evocation of an era that might seem overfamiliar and cliched to many. In fact, barring the absence of an index, it’s hard to find fault with this thoroughly enjoyable glimpse into high fashion and low life.
Young, gay, handsome and socially effervescent, Nutter de-cobwebbed bespoke tailoring ... The Nutter story intersects not only a steady stream of the rich and famous. It also joins many of the currents of the 20th century: the ebb and flow from wartime privation to excess back to austerity; the progress of gay visibility and the trauma of the AIDS crisis; the shaking off of dress codes and then (to Nutter’s sometime chagrin) the irrevocable casualization of the wardrobe. His professional fortunes rose and fell as tastes changed ... As an act of historical preservation, House of Nutter is worthy, restoring Nutter to the record for future generations; as a scandal sheet of gossip, it is often campy and fun. But despite the parade of stars who pass through it, House of Nutter often wrestles with a sense of anticlimax ... What lingers is the vision of Tommy Nutter as a man slightly too modern for his time, though very much of it, one of the great characters of fashion if not, perhaps, one of the greats.
I planned to speed-read it on an airplane but soon found myself slowing down so I could savor every drop ... With all the ink that’s been spilled on Beatlemania, Studio 54, sixties counterculture, and the rest, it’s remarkable to find a new story to tell, with characters who were there all along, as if waiting for someone to notice.
Richardson skillfully and quite deftly proffers a seemingly endless supply of information about the players, the times, the mindset and so much more that the reader may find his or herself totally engrossed in the story rather than just the genre of fashion. Tommy Nutter was a major player in the sartorial history of menswear and not some blip on the radar screen of fashion. It is to Richardson’s credit that he unearthed the saga of this man who, had he lived in this century, might have engendered the white light kind of hype that he never truly received during his times.
The rock ‘n’ roll spirit–imported by Britain in the 50s and 60s and made that country’s own—infuses every page of House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row. The Beatles, the Stones, and Elton John, all dance through this delightful and compelling book, and though they’re the music makers here, all were styled by Tommy Nutter ... the specter of AIDS looms as large and dark as anything ever on the horizon, when it hits, it still startles and destroys in a way both familiar yet freshly devastating ... In writing about Tommy’s illness and passing, writer Lance Richardson deserves the highest possible praise for his revealing compassion. So much has been written, so much has been lost, that the importance of getting it 'right,' so to speak, cannot be understated.
House of Nutter is a tale that is quintessentially of its era, told by a biographer who combines pace and exhaustiveness. Tommy, along with his brother David, a photographer who snapped his way through the same worlds of fashion and celebrity, were a pair of blue-collar-boys-made-good in the class crucible of Sixties London. The alchemy of taste, of cool, of sheer force of personality could transform a life in ways that earlier generations could not have imagined. Unimaginable too, that a gay man could—eventually—live and love openly. For this is also the story of two brothers finding their way out of the closet.
Richardson’s telling of the story of the Nutter brothers’ journeys from humble beginnings to the sex, drugs, and rock and roll escapades of the 1970s and 1980s features a remarkable cast of characters and intriguing photographs, including the iconic album cover of Abbey Road, on which three of the Beatles wear Nutter suits. As gay men in an intolerant time, the Nutters often had to navigate a hostile mainstream society, but they did find acceptance in their chosen fields. Richardson’s social history of the fashion and music scenes in two resonant twentieth-century decades in London and New York is astute and fascinating.
Mapping out Nutter’s life from beginning to end, the author capitalizes on the moments in his subject’s life that caused significant ripples in society ... Refreshingly, Richardson has created a work that is surprisingly unpretentious; the author looks at Nutter’s life with impressive objectivity, zeroing in on significant episodes and leaving the rest on the cutting-room floor. The author also gives close attention to Tommy’s relationship with his brother, David ... An exciting addition to fashion history.
His descriptions of Tommy’s designs are eloquent and vivid (Tommy’s suits are called 'neo-Edwardian dandyism'), and are accompanied by 170 photographs that capture the fashion spirit of the age, many of them taken by brother David. Richardson’s affection for his subjects is touching and establishes a tone of admiration, and while this results in occasionally glossing over the Nutters’ faults (there are bewilderingly brief references to Tommy’s 'episodes of operatic drama'), his enthusiasm is contagious.
