What Luxury Means to Me: Simon Holloway, creative director of dunhill

‘I think we’re at an interesting point where a lot of people of means have a lot of nice things. Perhaps more so than ever before. And what’s happened is that a lot of people now have the same things. And when a lot of people have the same nice things, some of those people want to have something that’s different.’

So says Simon Holloway, creative director of dunhill, who cut his design teeth working for a number of very special fashion houses, including Ralph Lauren in the States and Jimmy Choo and Purdey in the UK, before landing the job of steering one of Britain’s most famous luxury brands into the 21st century.

‘I feel that that’s where we’re at,’ he continues. ‘There is a cluster of people, perhaps at the nexus of what we call “luxury”, where there’s a discernment and a taste level that pushes beyond what’s generally out there. These people want something that’s exceptional. They want the boat, or the artwork, or that dinner in that restaurant that is only open three months of the year where things are laid on the plate with tweezers and the provenance of the food is so exceptional. It’s a desire to have something almost impalpably special.’

Holloway, who took the reins at dunhill some 18 months ago, understands that special is not so easy to produce. But he feels that dunhill has the provenance and history to help him do this.

‘When I arrived at dunhill, I realised that we had a history here of creating this type of product, a product that would elicit this type of emotional response. The world of dunhill was so expansive in terms of the breadth of what it encompassed; it was remarkable, from the tailoring to the hard luxury items. And yet, that was just the surface. If you go deeper than that then it becomes this very affecting human story. At its core there is craftsmanship – a company started by Alfred Dunhill in 1893 making accessories for the new motorcars. Here, metalwork and industrial design were perfected before moving on to clothing. Tailoring was started at dunhill in 1908 with the car coat and sport tailoring and gradually evolved into the refined tailoring we know today, and also into evening clothes.’

What struck Holloway about the ethos of the company was the level of craft that was required to make its goods. As dunhill moved from the world of the motorcar, for which it made all manner of items like car horns and lights (its slogan was “everything but the motor”), to clothes and drivers’ accessories (the magnifying “Bobby Finder” goggles, for example, that allowed you to spot a policeman in the distance), the skills needed might have changed, but the philosophy of expertise remained the same.

‘All these things were made by people literally turning metal or stitching things,’ says Holloway. ‘That level of rarity, of humanity and craftsmanship in what we make – that’s the real sense of luxury. Even today, when we work with fabric mills we ask them to make things a little bit lighter or a little bit more matt or more milled and more finished; or as we work with modern technology, we get them to do multiple iterations of CAD designs before we decide on the scale of, say, a glencheck. It’s then woven by them, and they finish it to the level of milling that we want it to be finished to, so as to make it look more English and not Italian… and so on. These are the sort of steps that create something luxurious in the genuine sense of the word.’

And in our age of mass production and the rise of machine learning and the ubiquitousness of the digital, this sort of human involvement and creativity is arguably becoming ever more valuable.

‘It's the human element of craftsmanship that matters. It has to be learned and, as a designer, I have to be prepared to learn from the artisans I work with, too. There’s a back and forth between the designer and the craftsman that I think has been going on for eternity, because artisans and craftspeople aren’t necessarily designers. Some of them make things in their own way, in their own hand and with their own sense of expression, but sometimes when a designer approaches a craftsperson and they are able to collaborate, that’s when you get the true uniqueness; you get a kind of spark of imagination and the magic comes to fruition through something material.

This partnership between designer and artisan is what lies at the heart of Holloway’s work for the British brand. ‘At dunhill, everything we do comes down to this dialogue between craft and design,’ he explains. ‘This, of course, derives from the origins of the house and the origins of the founder. dunhill today is the result of a legacy of craft and engineering and innovation. We try to constantly refer to that knowledge, that savoir faire – it informs everything we do. It’s the lens that we see everything through, every decision that we make.’

Of course, the results of this approach are not always immediately obvious. ‘I sometimes think we’re a bit mad in this quest,’ confesses Holloway. ‘We have these conversations in the design studio that, if people could hear them, would make them think we’re super-geeks. We’re obsessing about the proportion of a check and how colourful the line in it is… and really, probably the majority of people looking at it wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.’

However, that’s not really the point. As Holloway says, ‘In the end, it’s precisely that level of obsession that results in true luxury.’

This is an attitude that deeply resonates with us at J Craft, where each of our signature Torpedo models is hand-built and requires some 8,000 to 10,000 working hours to create.
Each is also made to order and so is completely bespoke and individually tailored to the desires of the client, which are mediated by our designers and artisans.

The challenge here, of course, is that while clients might have a clear idea of what it is they want, they often don’t quite know how to translate this. This is, as Holloway says, where that magic happens, with the designer and the artisan extracting that vision, articulating it and then translating it into a tangible design through “savoir faire”. This delivers true luxury, what Holloway calls ‘exceptional’; something that is, in his words, ‘impalpably special’.

An example of this is the new project J Craft and dunhill have partnered on that launches at the Palm Beach International Boat Show this year: an exquisite bridle-leather cocktail case for your boat that is designed to be removable so you can take it with you when you disembark. It’s based on a number of cocktail cases in the dunhill archive, and Holloway is thrilled to have found a maritime use for the idea.

‘dunhill and J Craft are similar in that we are both passionate about artisan skill and true craftsmanship, and we both share a love of the handmade,’ he says. ‘We also both employ the best materials and seek to combine beauty and function. The dunhill cocktail case embodies all of this, and I am so pleased that we are partnering with this remarkable Swedish boatbuilder to give the case a home on board its beautiful vessels.’

dunhill.com