Stephen Conroy

Stephen Conroy meets clients where they happen to be. An office in DIFC. A high-end lounge in Downtown Dubai. Wherever a man with a phone and a roll of cloth can sit down for forty-five minutes without anyone minding the bolts of suiting laid out on the table.

There is no Grafton Tailors shop. The visible end of Grafton is Stephen, his car, and the cloth. Behind him is a full team of cutters and stitchers turning out the garments. On the strength of the work alone, that team has doubled in the past year.

I met him in a cigar lounge in Downtown Dubai. I had asked for golf shorts in a mid-weight cotton that could survive a sweat-through round at Emirates. He arrived ahead of time, laid the cloth out across the side table, took the measurements, and left. There was no second fitting because there did not need to be one. When the shorts arrived three weeks later they were the best pair I own.

His path into tailoring is not the usual one. Stephen spent the better part of a decade as an elite competitive cyclist before he picked up a tape measure. The discipline carried over: cycling is millimetre work, and so is bespoke tailoring. The same patience, the same tolerance for being two millimetres off, the same allergic reaction to anything close to good enough.

He is from Dublin. He named the company after the city’s most famous shopping street. He moved to Dubai in 2020 and spent his first five years at Suited and Booted, one of the better-known sartorial houses in the city, learning what the Gulf climate asks of a suit. Alongside the day job he started posting work on Instagram under the handle The Dubai Tailor, and the audience found him faster than he expected. By the time he set up Grafton on his own, the demand was already there.

The clients are mostly real estate agents, though it has spread to family offices and the consulting world. They are out on viewings every day, they need to look the part, and they go through suits faster than most. Most of his work is repeat. Once a pattern is on file, second and third commissions skip an entire fitting and a whole conversation.

The cloth comes from Huddersfield Textiles, the English cloth merchant and manufacturer based in Yorkshire that supplies bespoke tailors with worsted suiting and cloth bunches. Stephen keeps a working selection in active rotation and ships in anything specific within a couple of weeks.

He does not advertise much. The Instagram is still active. The website is functional. Most of his business comes through people who already wear his clothes telling other people that they do, which is the way it should work and rarely does.

“If the work is good,” he said, packing the cloth back into its bag, “the work tells the story.”