Proper English.

Byline: editor: Sally Singer

A weekend of shooting and entertaining in the country leads Plum Sykes to the very pieces she'll keep and wear forever.

There is nothing I enjoy more than dressing up for the one weekend a year when my husband and I entertain. (Believe me, it is only once a year, downturn or not.) Every fall my husband takes a day's partridge shooting on gallerist Detmar Blow's Hilles estate in Gloucestershire, England. There is "elevenses" (morning tea) and lunch at our pretty farmhouse on the Hilles grounds, and a black-tie dinner in the big house that night. The dress code is nonnegotiable: tweeds for day and grand dress for dinner. "I find it hilarious," says Gwyneth Paltrow, "that in America, at dinner in the country, you're in sweatpants and cashmere, but in England you bust out your couture."

Last year the Zeitgeist took hold of me. I needed a Forever wardrobe for the shooting weekend, clothes that would look wonderful beyond one season. Rather than evoking depressing postwar thrift, my imagined Forever wardrobe sounded deeply glamorousthe kind of thing I could have inherited from my grandmother or could pass on to my daughter. No matter it was destined to have only two things in it (for now).

The first major decision was to have a tweed suit made in London; after all, Savile Row suits do go on and on. A few years ago I'd heard about a terribly cool tailor on the top floor of Stella McCartney's store on Bruton Street who made bespoke suits for her friends (Gwyneth, Madonna), and I decided to check him out.

Henry Rose, trained by the Savile Row greats Doug Hayward, Kilgour, and Tommy Nutter, is five feet three, his shoulders just peeking above his high cutting table. Could he make me a tweed suit in time for my shooting weekend? "Yes!" he barked, furiously sharpening his chalk. Could it be a cross between my favorite Stella and Alexander McQueen jackets and my super rock-'n'-roll Tom Ford trousers? "Yes!" snapped Henry, telling me to return with the items the next day.

Let's talk about money for a moment, as that is all anyone talks about these days. The cost of the suit was going to be A[pounds sterling]2,400 (about $3,600). "Bespoke is expensive," says Stella McCartney, who has been dressing in Savile Row since she was seventeen. "But you have it for your entire life. All my dad's Beatles suits are still going." Stella always gets a three-piece suit with two pairs of trousers, one skinny and one wide-leg. "Which means you've got at least four outfits, and you only had to buy one jacket."