The must-know menswear label: SEH Kelly Sara Kelly's men's collection represents the very best of British, says Gareth Wyn Davies. Allow me to introduce the groovy menswear designer Sara Kelly and her boyfriend Paul Vincent, pictured below in their tiny studio-cum-showroom in the East End of London (Sara's the one on the left, obviously). Like, it's really tiny, with barely room to swing a tailor's measure, let alone a cat. But it is here that the pair of them design exquisite, hand-finished men's clothes in the quietly luxurious Margaret Howell mould, all of them made in Britain. Admittedly, I have cropped the picture but, trust me, there really isn't much more to it than what you see, apart from a half-height mezzanine reached by a rickety-looking ladder, and a boarded-up corner fireplace. They joke that if they ever get the luxury of an intern, the fireplace will be where he/she will have to park themselves. Sara Kelly with her boyfriend and business partner Paul Vincent. As well as being a contender for the world's smallest fashion HQ, it's got to be the neatest too, probably out of necessity. It's certainly a long way from Savile Row and the couture house Hardy Amies, where Sara used to work and finally committed herself to menswear (she is very witty on Downton-esque code of knock-before-you-enter etiquette at Amies). "It was there that I realised that men's was what I wanted to do," she says. With men's clothes it is more about the little things, like the textures and the button details. Sara laughs that the tidiness is no thanks to her - she is naturally quite messy and Paul is forever having to clear up after her. Though it should be said that his role in their partnership is a bit more developed than that - while she does the designing, he does all the clever web stuff for their (very cool - check it out) online shop and has become, by default, her fit model/muse because he's a) angular and lean and b) the only bloke to hand. So it's Paul-sized brown-paper patterns that you see dangling off butcher's hooks along the back wall next to the intern-to-be's fireplace, Paul-sized samples in beautiful shades of taupey grey, brown and cream hanging off a peg rail. It's all very Shaker-like in its simplicity - rather like the clothes, which are so stripped of unnecessary ornament as to be almost ascetic-looking. Then you feel them. A wool-and-cashmere jacket is as soft as a baby's comforter, a brushed-cotton shirt feels like a flannelette sheet (that's a compliment in my book, by the way!), buttons are proper horn. But the best thing, as I say, is that everything - from the raw cloth to the finished jackets, shorts, trousers and jumpers - is made in Britain. "I've been fortunate enough throughout my career to work with British factories," says Sara. When I started my own thing I decided I wanted to continue that. Our customers understand that they have to pay a little bit more for British cloth and production, but they just get it. The country's mills and factories obviously love the pair of them for it (except when Sara insists on the labels and those horn buttons being hand-sewn, when they tend to grimace ever so politely), as do the Japanese, who of course as good as fetishise all things old-world British and can't get enough of the SEH Kelly label. They've also got a loyal and growing band of domestic customers of all ages, chief among them Sara's 68-year-old father who lives in Tenby, in Pembrokeshire, and wears one of their early jumpers, made from Yorkshire merino wool, every day. The pockets, he tells her, are just the job for carrying around his pills. And he's even more proud of her now that she has shifted production of knitwear to Wales. sehkelly.com