Today is Jack Taylor's 93rd birthday, a fact that had escaped my attention until three minutes after I showed up at his Beverly Hills shop this morning to interview him.

The legendary Beverly Hills tailor -- who has made suits for a mind-boggling array of high-profile men from the Duke of Windsor to Luke Walton -- is spending his birthday the way he's spent the better part of the last 70 years: in the door of his shop by 7 a.m. and out at 5 p.m. In between he fusses over fabrics, coordinates colors and oversees every step of a handmade on-site process that turns bolts of worsted wool into exquisite suits for the well-heeled.

"We're going out to dinner with some friends," Taylor told me, sitting behind his large wooden desk, clad in a black tone-on-tone stripe suit, white pique button-down dress shirt, a gray check necktie and matching pocket square, eyeglasses the size of saucers. "Used to be going out to dinner meant being able to hustle some business, but now you don't need a tie or a jacket or even long pants to eat in a restaurant."

Taylor's been hustling business since the Great Depression when he met a New York tailor he calls Mr. Restivo (and whose weathered picture, with a twentysomething Taylor sits on his desk), who made him a suit in exchange for helping drum up clientele (band leader Glenn Miller was among the first whom Taylor persuaded to get a custom-made suit).