Alexander Riley

ALEXANDER RILEY, 42, Gordon Street, Glasgow, Merchant Tailor, Hosier, Glover, Shirtmaker, Home, Colonial, and Foreign Outfitter.

    The tailoring and outfitting business forms a department of industrial activity in Glasgow necessarily of very considerable value and importance, and many of the leading city houses engaged therein enjoy a reputation quite as widespread and as well merited as do some of the most representative firms of London, Oxford, or Cambridge. A leading house, possessing more than a local celebrity in this department of industrial enterprise, is that of Mr. Alexander Riley, whose business, established in 1868 under the style of Messrs. Riley, Webster, and Borland, is now conducted under the sole proprietorship of Mr. Riley at his new premises in Gordon Street.

    The premises are of considerable extent, and consist of a handsome shop, showrooms, and commodious well-appointed and thoroughly ventilated workrooms. It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that each department of the establishment is fitted up in the most convenient manner for the proper and efficient administration of the business. The splendid street facade affords abundant facilities for the adequate display of a stock which, in respect of elegance and superiority, is absolutely without its peer. So great is the patronage extended to Mr. Riley’s establishment by his fashionable clientele, that upwards of eighty skilled salesmen, cutters, journeymen tailors, shirtmakers, and other workpeople find regular employment.

    Mr. Riley carries out to the letter the instructions of his patrons in the matter of style, but they are the wiser who leave it to Mr. Riley’s own good taste to fix the various details of cut, fit, style, and general tout ensemble of the garments required. Mr. Riley has the credit of being the originator of the 18/6 Trouser Scheme, in which, though he has had many subsequent imitators, he still maintains an unrivalled supremacy ; and no less successful as well as beneficial to the general community has been his determined advocacy and adoption of the cash system of trading, a system which has hitherto been unknown in connection with the higher branches of the clothing trade.

    Shirts, hosiery, and gloves also engage the attention of the house, and as the maker of the “Corona” shirt, Mr. Riley has long ago demonstrated his superior skill. He is in direct communication with the best sources of supply for all description of hygienic hosiery, cotton, merino, lambswool, Scotch lambswool, sanitary dyed or undyed wool, &c., &c. For gloves, Mr. Riley’s establishment has also attained celebrity, while such items as linen collars, cuffs, fronts, silk neckties, scarfs, handkerchiefs, and other indispensable adjuncts of the gentleman’s wardrobe are abundantly en evidence. The business throughout is most ably conducted, and no one can visit the establishment without experiencing the conviction that no effort nor expense has been spared in order to place it in the very foremost rank of the trade in Glasgow.

Back to Index of Firms (1891)