Favourbrook did not begin with a manifesto, a lookbook or a grand plan for formalwear. It began, as so many good London stories do, on Portobello Road. It was 1990. Oliver Spencer had come out of art school and was making a living the hard way: shirts, menswear accessories and second-hand clothes, sold from a stall among the market’s early-morning barrows and late-afternoon bargains. Portobello Road was his university. You learned to trade, to talk, to judge cloth by hand, and to notice what people actually wanted to wear rather than what they were told they should.
London at the time was a city of diverse style tribes. There was the rave crowd, emerging around '88 with the advent of acid house and Balearic beats, beloved of baggy surf-disco aesthetics, dungarees, and spot dresses; the Goths, characterised by post-punk perversity and dark Victorian influences; the High Camp, defined by performance art extravagance with muses like Leigh Bowery at clubs like Taboo; Glam Fetish, which focused on buckles, gold, and leather, personified by Boy George and Siouxsie Sioux; and finally the New Romantics, whose billowing shirts and glam makeup crossed over from clubs like The Blitz to mainstream fashion. Against that backdrop of sharp edges, Oli was looking for clothing with a pulse. Individual, but romantic. Formal, but always playful too.
Oli started making shirts and menswear accessories before a turning point arrived in the guise of leftover silk. Through a family introduction he was given the chance to look through the end rolls and seconds at Stephen Walters & Sons, the Sudbury silk mill whose weaving lineage runs back to 1720. Among the remnants were ecclesiastical cloths: brocades and jacquards woven originally for vestments, rich with pattern and an unapologetic sense of occasion. Most people would have seen damaged stock. Oli saw waistcoats.
He took the silks, borrowed a pattern from a friend, and began to cut. The waistcoat was the perfect first garment: small enough to make, large enough to change a room. It sat under a jacket and did all the talking. In a decade obsessed with tribes, here was a piece that let a man keep the rules of dressing well while still making a statement about himself.
Those early waistcoats found their first proper home when Oli was offered a small shop in Piccadilly Arcade, a pocket of St James’s that already understood the ceremony of dressing. Not long afterwards, in the early nineties, Favourbrook moved onto Jermyn Street. The name itself was an old family middle name: slightly courtly, slightly mischievous, and entirely fitting.
Then came the film...
Four Weddings and a Funeral was released in 1994 and did what no market stall or arcade window could do on its own. It put London, and a very particular kind of British dressing, on a global stage. Favourbrook waistcoats featured in the film; hand-painted and patterned styles suddenly felt like part of the national conversation. The film did not invent the business, but it catalysed it, and we suddenly took off. Velvet jackets followed. Morning dress began to gather around the waistcoat rather than the other way around. Formalwear, which had grown stuffy, was allowed to be fun again.
Womenswear arrived the same way everything else had: because someone asked. The wives and partners of our male customers loved the fabrics - the silks, the velvets, the sense that cloth could carry character - and understandably wanted something of their own. A small collection was made. It has never been an afterthought. The same idea applies on both sides of the shop: occasionwear that honours the code without surrendering personality.
What Oli wanted for Favourbrook, from the beginning, was a sense of romance and cheekiness. Romance in the cloth, the cut, the feeling that dressing up is still worth the trouble. Cheekiness in the refusal to treat formality as a lecture or anodyne uniform. The correct attire for a special occasion need not erase the person wearing it. That thought has survived every expansion.
In 2017 we opened our flagship store on Pall Mall in a building by Edwin Lutyens, with the space at last to show a complete collection of morning dress alongside eveningwear, velvet jackets, and the waistcoats that started it all. Piccadilly Arcade remains the house of waistcoats and accessories. Together the two shops made Favourbrook London’s destination for formalwear and occasionwear - still independent, still reacting to customers rather than to trends, still making most of the formal pieces in London.
More than thirty years on, the story is not a relic. It is the reason a groom still spends an afternoon trying six waistcoats. It is why a velvet jacket can leave the dinner table and go to the pub. It is why new customers, opening a parcel or walking into Pall Mall for the first time, are being told the same thing Oli's Portobello market stall once implied: dress properly, by all means. Just do it with a little romance, and a lot of fun.
