Prince Charles’s jacket was cut in the early 1990s whilst I was at Anderson & Sheppard. The story goes that HRH visited his mother and hung his jacket over the back of a chair. And as corgis do, they decided to have a good chew at the corner of his double-breasted coat. Not the first sartorial tragedy involving either pets or children. It was returned to the workshop where Paul “Griff” Griffiths, the then-apprentice to Pat Davey [coat-maker at Anderson & Sheppard] had to carefully unpick and separate the damaged forepart of the coat. Then a basic replica was cut that was copied exactly to fit the rest of the coat and match the opposite side perfectly. Making is hard enough, but this requires great, almost forgery-like, skills. Eventually, the job was done, and no one could tell the difference, except Paul and his mentor, Pat. A sweet detail of that time is that Paul would always keep a little snip of cloth from any suits that were being made and send them to his doting mother. She would then scour the press and media to match up the sample with any images of suits that HRH was wearing. Then, of course, on finding a match she’d declare to friends, family and anyone who’d listen, “My son made that!” Paul kept the old forepart as a souvenir, and that’s why we have it at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Boston.