#wensum

Perhaps understandably, the brands which use Wensum don’t like to advertise it, and for the same reason, Wensum itself makes little mention of its remarkable presence across the British RTW landscape, preferring to be discrete about the work it does for numerous brands from the high street to Savile Row.

At the same time, this means that Wensum itself goes largely uncelebrated despite producing fine garments which get plenty of attention under names other than their own. There is a house line of RTW, Bladen, which is marketed largely as an English Heritage brand---full of rich and generously cut tweeds---aimed at a lower market segment than Richard James and the like.

More interestingly, perhaps, Wensum also produces a self-branded line of MTM, which means the same factory MTM product is available (although not the specific jacket block) as through, say, Richard James made to measure.

Finally, for those of us in the UK, there is a good deal of Wensum tailoring floating around the secondary markets of eBay and the like. I recently bought a couple of pairs of trousers, made up in VBC super 120s, to the same specifications as my Ede and Ravenscroft suits, in a “slim fit” which fell in that golden place between a generous English cut and the Suit Supply skinny fit which many people, including me, find unwearable.

If you keep an eye out, you can pick up new trousers and suits for a tiny fraction of the price that they would cost from the bigger names. (Just be aware that Wensum make at many different levels, from a top line of half-canvassed modern suits in Italian cloths to a much simpler product in synthetic cloths made up for restaurant work and so on.)