The glamorous but tough industry of luxury hotel uniforms
UK design studios that produce bespoke clothing for grand hotels face complex demands
New Yorkers who visit the Peacock Alley cocktail bar in the Waldorf Astoria hotel are now served in the evenings by men in peacock blue velvet suits and women in floor-length sequin gowns. Produced by a small design studio in Shoreditch, east London, these are not ordinary hotel uniforms.
A luxury hotel with rooms starting at $1,500 a night, which has reopened after a $2bn restoration taking eight years, cannot afford to neglect its clothing. The Waldorf Astoria New York has polished up everything from Cole Porter’s lobby piano to a clock commissioned by Queen Victoria. Its staff must also look the part.
The man responsible for the Peacock Alley garb, along with Prince of Wales check three-piece suits worn by other staff, is Nicholas Oakwell, a former milliner who has helped to lead the transformation of staff uniforms in global luxury hotels from Dubai to Singapore. Where they once used off-the-peg clothing, many hotel brands now boast bespoke sets of designs.
Luxury uniform design is a little-known apparel niche, somewhere between the originality and expressiveness of fashion and the fast-paced demands of the hospitality business. “They say, ‘Nicholas, the hoop is there’ and I jump,” Oakwell says of NO Uniform, the studio he founded 23 years ago with a £250,000 order from London’s Great Eastern (now Andaz) hotel.
The Waldorf Astoria is Oakwell’s first New York commission but his clothing can be seen from the Rosewood Hotel in London to the Raffles Doha and the Jumeirah Carlton Tower. He has plenty of competition: the UK has a cluster of travel and leisure uniform studios, from Studio 104 to Fashionizer and Jalin Design, which work there and abroad.
The international nature of London and its history of grand hotels such as the Savoy and the Connaught have helped them gain work globally. So has the mobility of many hotel managers: Luigi Romaniello, managing director of the Waldorf Astoria New York, knew Oakwell’s work from having run the Rosewood Abu Dhabi.
The bespoke uniform business has grown in the past two decades as an emphasis on design has spread from a few boutique hotels, such as The Royalton in New York, to many luxury hotel chains. Mid-market groups such as Hilton Hotels, which operates the Waldorf Astoria New York, have also pushed into luxury.
This has increased the number of five-star hotels that are willing to pay the typical cost for an opening of about £1,500 per head to clothe everyone from porters to waiters and receptionists in bespoke uniforms. “They want the staff to look good and to be part of the story they are creating,” says Jane Porter, founder of Studio 104.
But uniform design is a demanding business. The top line sounds good, with some contracts worth £500,000, plus longer-term sales from replacing worn-out clothing, but it includes a lot of work. Studios cover everything from designs to pattern-making, arranging production, and staff fittings before hotel openings (known as “installation”).
One hotel can have a huge range of staff uniforms: NO Uniform produced 120 styles for a Gulf hotel. This is multiplied by all the body sizes, so a studio may produce more than 500 patterns. There is some guesswork in predicting how many of each will be needed for staff who get hired later.
Uniforms must simultaneously look good, be comfortable enough for staff to wear for long shifts and be long-lasting. A pure wool suit is breathable but is also likely to wear quickly: each member of staff is allocated two or three sets of clothes to cover the cycle of laundering.
They also have to last aesthetically. The initial design costs are so high that owners want to avoid changing them: a hotel will often keep its uniform for more than a decade. Most will combine a classic look with a fashion flourish: “They want to see the old pomp and ceremony, up to a point,” Oakwell says of the under-40s customers now patronising grand hotels.
The broad range of demands, along with increasing competition, means that studios have reached beyond hotels. Jalin Design also makes film and television costumes, while Oakwell has produced uniforms for wealthy Gulf households and crews of superyachts. Porter of Studio 104 hopes to expand further into airline uniforms, having already made private jet crew clothing.
Airlines place larger orders with fewer variations, while hotels are “incredibly demanding”, Porter says. What used to be a design studio niche has become a tougher industry.