Mencyclopaedia: Hackett - Telegraph From Portobello market to the old Raj and the very modern Baftas. India casually spurns Britain's aid, yet it keenly craves our tweed. Reports from the subcontinent suggest that a local clothing conglomerate named Madura is proposing a partnership with Hackett that could see this pukka British clothing brand establish outposts from Kerala to Kashmir. Already, Hackett's neatly-turned footprint is already well established in 80 outlets across the world, from Scandinavia to Spain, via Mexico, Australia and China, where 45 new stores are set to open soon. They even, says founder Jeremy Hackett with some satisfaction, do excellently in France: "They may hate us - but they love our clothes." Mencyclopaedia: Huntsman and Alexander McQueen Just 30 years ago, Hackett territory encompassed the few scant miles between Portobello Road and the Fulham Road. Mr Hackett would arrive at Portobello market by 4:30am with a torch to trawl the clothes stalls for, presumably, dead or down-on-their-luck gentlemens Savile Row suits, corduroy trousers, and tweed jackets. The stallholder might say 'Take this one, it's a nice Marks & Spencer', but I'd say 'no thanks, this one will do'. I'd know it was handmade, Savile Row suit - and only a fiver. The margins were terrific. Those clothes that weren't machine-gunned by mothholes, Hackett sold in what quickly blossomed into a nano-empire of five small Fulham shops. What Hackett had struck upon by 1983 was the voracious (and now reflowering) contemporary appetite for classic British mens clothing. He could sell 70 pairs of second-hand jumbo cords on a Saturday and observed that financially-challenged Fulham blades in search of the tailored, just-so look "would come in and fight over certain jackets. So you could see what they liked, and we started to reproduce it. Mencyclopaedia: Paisley Within three years, Hackett was producing its first tweed and corduroy jackets, which, after a little persuasion, the customers took to. Richemont, the owner of Dunhill, acquired the company at the beginning of the Nineties - the company was then "on a bit of a sticky wicket" - and began its retail expansion with a large shop just off Sloane Square. That store, like most of them, is divided into sartorial regions: there's the skull and crossbones-like crossed brollies and bowler hat logoed tailoring zone, where the suits are streamlined of fit in classic chalk or pin stripes and other British materials. There is a collegiate, coloured scarf-dominated zone, a biker-jacketed area that proudly puffs Hackett's sponsorship deal with Aston Martin (it also sponsors the London Rowing Club) and, crucially, a country-ish area dominated by tweed, corduroy and tattersall. That, says Hackett, is generally the area by the front door as it signifies the Britishness that customers seek. As everywhere else, the elbow patch is hard to avoid in Hackett at the moment, but - apart from a special diamond patch on a Diamond Jubilee tweed jacket in the pipeline - Mr H says it's now time to reign in that elbow patch ubiquity a little. Instead, Hackett is now focusing on formalwear, as official penguin-suit supplier to this Sunday's Baftas. Stephen Fry (he's gone for a classic peak lapel evening suit in barathea), Jim Broadbent, Richard E Grant and many others will be Hacketted for the night. Hackett's eponymous business has, since 2005, been controlled by the Spanish owners of Pepe, the jeans brand, who Hackett sincerely praises. Yet he wears, I reckon, just an ever-so-slight sense of remorse that he is no longer more than nominally at the head of this flourishing, international empire of gentlemanly attire. If so, though, it is worn with as much graceful lightness as he wears his impeccable, classic, turned-up suit. Read more of Luke Leitch's columns