Today marks the beginning of the 25th London Fashion Week.

And though many industry insiders have long ago pronounced London “dead as a fashion capital”, makeover king Harold Tillman, now chairman of British Fashion Council,  is about to do what he does best…turn slacking businesses and and brands around.

“I want us to become again what we rightfully deserve to be: the most innovative, creative fashion capital in the world. …[In London] you have the chic of the couture in Paris, you have the refined quality of Italy and you have the commerciality of America. What we’ve got is raw talent — which is fearless.” – Harold Tillman

Mr. Tillman would know a thing or two about British Fashion and Turnarounds.

The 64-year-old Mogul has built an empire rejuvenating aging British retailers.

Tillman has successfully salvaged William Baird and Jaeger Ltd., among others, and is now in the process of turning around the venerable luxury trench-coat maker Aquascutum.

These are’nt just aging businesses these are British Institutions. 125 year old Jaeger once clothed Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw and helped finance the Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 Antarctica expedition.

Aquascutum is 158 years old and got it’s start making coats for British soldiers in the Crimean War and would later cloth British icons Sean Connery and Margaret Thatcher.

Tillman is as authentic a disciple of old-school British Fashion as there is.

He grew up in South London, where his father was a tailor and his mother a milliner, and he remembers walking down Regent Street with his parents, who would banter about the designs in the windows of Jaeger and Aquascutum, classic British clothiers he now owns. Later, after learning tailoring at the London College of Fashion, he rose from college-age design apprentice to managing director at a Savile Row suit-maker by the age of 24 and became the youngest person to float a company on the London Stock Exchange when the clothier went public. It was there, on Savile Row, where Mr. Tillman met designer Paul Smith and gave him his start.

As for Tillman’s personal fashion sense, he describes his style as “sartorial” and says “Ralph Lauren fits him like a glove”. Formally trained as a designer and an accountant, he is an ardent fan of classic British style and is known for wearing waistcoats and handkerchiefs.

Since taking control of London Fashion Week,  Mr. Tillman has appointed two full-time chief executives to run the British Fashion Council more like a business. He has also “remedied the longstanding homelessness of London Fashion Week” by finding it a permanent venue at the Somerset House, London’s version of  Bryant Park in New York and Paris’s Carrousel du Louvre.

Using the fact that this year is London Fashion Weeks’ 25th anniversary he has managed to lure some big name designers back in, including Burberry and Pringle of Scotland, which had previously been showing in Milan.

What does Harold Tillman have to say on turning around slacking businesses/brands?

“You don’t do everything at once: You try to improve, quickly, what’s going well, and then when you find out what’s going wrong, you need to take evasive action.”

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