A tailoring house founded in 1858, a shop Adolf Loos finished in 1913, and a man who started work there in 1956 and is still the owner. Two of those three are unchanged.
Bernhard Roetzel went to Vienna for Permanent Style to ask what survives of the legend, which is the only way to find out. Knize was founded in 1858 by Josef Kniže, a tailor from Bohemia; by the 1920s it was dressing Marlene Dietrich in tails and had Billy Wilder as a regular. Among Vienna’s old families it occupies roughly the position Turnbull & Asser holds in London. Outside Vienna, hardly anyone has heard of it.
The building is the reason to make the detour even if you buy nothing. Adolf Loos designed the Graben 13 premises between 1910 and 1913, and it survives almost intact — which makes it one of the very few Loos commercial interiors you can simply walk into. The front is black granite, curved, sitting somewhere between two columns and two drawn curtains. Inside, Loos was working from English tailoring: narrow all-wood staircase, glazed cabinets, the feel of standing inside a wardrobe rather than a showroom. The lamps are his too, designed for this shop.
The continuity is not only architectural. Rudolf Niedersüß started at Knize in 1956, left in 1963 to buy C.M. Frank — another old Viennese house — bought Knize itself in 1976 and merged the two in 1978. He has been there, on and off, for seventy years. He added ready-to-wear when bespoke declined, then a ladies’ collection, which is the unromantic answer to how a house like this is still open at all.
Two honest notes. The shop today is a menswear specialist first: bespoke and ready-to-wear tailoring, shoes, accessories and loungewear, plus the fragrance line, of which Knize Ten is the famous one and still starts at €27. And a second address at Bräunerstraße 1 now carries part of the business — the Loos interior is the Graben one, so go to that door.
It is the rare shop where the correct order is architecture, then history, then clothes. Alan Flusser wrote it up in 1996 and made it slightly more famous. It has spent the thirty years since being world famous in Vienna.