Putting fresh color into menswear
 |  Boateng's latest Givenchy collection was on show in Paris this week. |
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- They've been making suits on London's famous Savile Row since the 18th century.
A world of old-fashioned manners and conservative fashions, the street symbolizes a venerable tailoring tradition not usually associated with the fashionable modern man.
But with his brightly colored and intricately detailed suits, Ozwald Boateng is taking the stuffiness out of Savile Row and introducing the bespoken suit to a new generation.
"When I first came to Savile Row it was really clear that the street was dying," he says.
"There was a need for something new. And what I clearly understood was that the tailors weren't really tailors, but couturiers for men. Defining it in that way, it meant that these tailors had the same potential as couturiers. So I went about showing that potential."
The son of Ghanaian immigrants to Britain, the 37-year-old has enjoyed a spectacular ascendancy through the fashion industry.
Last year Boateng was named as creative director by Givenchy, the first time the French fashion house had appointed anyone to the role since Hubery Givenchy himself.
Since then he has become the first tailor to stage a Paris catwalk show, while also featuring his own collection at the Milan Menswear Show. This week his latest ready-to-wear Givenchy collection went on show in Paris.
Along the way, Boateng has also built up a stellar list of clients that includes Samuel L. Jackson, Mick Jagger, Will Smith, Jude Law and David Bowie.
Yet Boateng fell into the fashion world fortuitously as a teenager, abandoning a college course in computing after discovering a talent for tailoring while helping a girlfriend produce a fashion show.
"I was at college studying computers and I had a girlfriend who said to me she'd started designing a collection and would I help her do it," he recalls. "I said, 'okay I'll help, but I'm not sure what kind of help I'm going to be,' and for whatever reason, and I don't know why, I had a natural talent for it."
But talent couldn't protect Boateng from harsh business realities. After opening his first Savile Row store in 1995, Boateng was hailed as an icon of "Cool Britannia," but in 1998 he went bankrupt when orders from Asia were cancelled. A year later an entire collection worth more than $140,000 was stolen from his studio.
Boateng bounced back, turning his label into a successful brand, retaining the quality associated with Savile Row but illustrating that tailoring can be trendy.
While he has branched out from formal wear to casual wear and accessories, his success has mostly been due to his reinvention of the dull, conformist grey suit as a colorful canvas for individual expression.
"I started off with bright linings and then it evolved into bright colored shirts and ties," he says.
"And then eventually I started moving the color into the actual tailoring fabrics themselves. And as I did that it completely changed the look of tailoring. I had found a way of, sort of, gentrifying color.
"Right up until that color was seen as camp, you're a dandy, but I had found a way of making color sexy and beautiful, but still very masculine."
