London House Company Tailors

Some would charge extra for visiting clients at their homes or offices. In the old days ‘house visits’ were normal for these ‘outfitters’ had to stitch undergarments. This was in the days before machine knitting arrived. Then there were concerns like Ranken, who offered the facility of “patterns forwarded upon application”. The era of ready-made clothes had not arrived, and in a way it has still n

ot fully arrived in Lahore, except for shirts and undergarments. To be honest, it has not even today arrived in London or Paris, where a gentleman is still known by the class of his tailor. At the time of the partition of the Punjab, Lahore had four major ‘tailors and outfitters’, Ranken, Pitman, Ismail and London House. Ranken and Pitman continued for some time. The original English owners left Lahore in 1947, handing over business to their trusted ones. was handed over to their master cutter, who ran the business from its original location opposite the Assembly Chambers. also continued to operate and closed down sometime in the 1970s. Then Pitman was ejected from its posh location and today the son of the cutter runs a small shop by the same name on Queens’ Road. But then it is a shadow of its glorious past. This left just two major tailoring concerns on The Mall, they being Ismail & Co., and London House, tailors and outfitters. London House, a concern started by Sheikh Muhammad Amin (1913 - 2010), who had learned his trade ‘abroad’. Most experts believed that he was a shade better than the other three ‘big’ tailoring houses. His son, Pervaiz, was also sent to learn this trade ‘abroad’, and he took up the tailoring business, while his brother ran the outfitters business in which he produced excellent leather shoes. London House has relocated to Queens’ Road opposite the fire brigade hill in the basement of the huge new building there. They have a complete record of each client, when and what was made, supported with small clippings of each fabric used. He is a class act and no less than those ‘greats’ from Burberry. He learned his craft from his father and fine-tuned it in the best tailoring school of Europe. But like Rankin he does not send “patterns on application”. He keeps his record, he draws each pattern himself, and as his old clients will testify, he only tries out clothes on new clients. The old ones know that he gets them right the very first time.