A bespoke tailor of any standing maintains a customer ledger that, in some houses, runs continuously for two centuries. The ledger records the customer, their measurements, the cloths they have selected, the garments they have ordered, the dates of fittings, the dates of delivery, and the sums charged. The records are held by the house and, in the great Savile Row firms, in the equivalent archives in Florence, Naples, Paris, and Hong Kong, in conditions of considerable care.

The records are private in the sense that they are held by the tailor and not published. They are not particularly secure in the sense that the tailoring trade is small, the staff move between firms, and the records have on occasion been the subject of historical research and published commentary. The customer book of a Royal warrant holder, for example, is among the more storied of the surviving documents of nineteenth-century life.

Modern conditions have added digital extensions to the records. A tailor's CRM system, where one exists, captures the same information in a form that is easier to lose to an incident than the bound ledger ever was. The customers' details, the orders, the preferences, and the personal notes that long-serving cutters maintain on their best clients, are now held electronically in many houses, with the security that the trade has historically not needed.

The cumulative description of a long-standing customer, across decades of orders, is unusually candid. The body, the preferences, the social calendar around which the orders are placed, the changes of address, the cloths chosen for particular occasions: each is a small record that, together, would amount to something more revealing than the customer ever consented to.

The work in this category is undramatic and largely about understanding. The tailor is, in most cases, an institution to which the customer has, over years, given considerable trust; the existing records are best addressed within that relationship. What can be considered is the modern handling: the digital systems, the back-up of the archive, the consent for any historical publication, and the framing of the customer in any of the press features that periodically explore the great houses of the trade.