September 2014 — February 2015

Home — Worn — September 2014 — February 2015

The SB2 jacket is made with cloth from a small mill in the Inner Hebrides — a region which, at least in tweed circles, is the other Hebrides. The mill weaves the yarn of sheep reared and sheared on its land — the SB2, for instance, combining the yarn of Hebridean sheep young and brown, and not so young and going grey.

The peacoat comes but once a year — and normally towards the end of it. This time, the fourteen-button double-breaster was made three tweeds from a father-son mill in County Donegal in Ireland. Likewise the diamond-weave blanket (below) — whose pattern is an old ancestral abstract take on the hills behind the weaving shed.

Cloth from County Donegal also appears — this time alongside russet-brown deerskin — on the notch-top gloves, made in the crucible of English glove-making. Responsible for them is a group of master craftspeople who, every day, act out the saying about a silk purse and a sow’s ear — before lining it with Scottish cashmere.

The tuck-stitch jumper is back for a third year running in all its ten-ply and thermonuclear-grade warmth — and alongside it, this time around, are one or two other knitted articles. Each one is hand-framed and fully fashioned, using the most stratocumulus-soft lambswool, by the best knitwear people in the Isles.

The merino-lambswool SB and standard trousers together make a fairly smart suit. Made in two indistinguishable shades of grey, what is absent, colour-wise, is made up for in other ways, such as the superior quality of the Yorkshire-woven cloth. Its merino content makes the stuff so smooth, it can be calming just to be in its presence.

You name a colour — the crest, say, of a juvenile Dartford Warbler — and the East Midlands dye-house can match it. No questions asked. Word has it they can concoct 50,000 different shades of turquoise. Presenting, then, the new garment-dyed calico-cotton granddad shirt — in an on-the-safe-side dark-grey.

The second (or perhaps third) iteration of the seam jacket finds the four-button hooded rain-cheater in civilian-weight cinnamon-colour Ventile cotton. While it has umpteen buttons, all of them are hidden when the jacket is fully done-up and the peaked hood is attached and ready to go. Likewise, although the jacket has five fairly large pockets, none of them are on show unless they are called into action. The weather-proofness of the Manchester-invented cloth itself, meanwhile, needs no introduction — unless, of course, it does, in which case, see here, here, and here.

The trousers above unite the respective wools of merino and lamb. They are soft and lightweight, yet very warm. Trousers like those left are made with tin-grey homespun wool: a coarse cloth, softer than a cheviot and lighter than a tweed. Then there are the two-leggers seen below — made from thick Shetland overcoating.

The tour jacket uses a stouter version of Ventile: a military-weight, which is heavier and denser than its civvy-edition counterpart. Back for autumn, this time the tour jacket has a West Yorkshire wool-melton lining. This, allied to the wind-resisting nature of the outer cloth, makes for a very robust late- and early-year coat.

The reversible overshirt is built like an overcoat, rather than a shirt — a heft backed up by a combination of cords. One side is a deadstock thick-thin corduroy, woven 20 years ago in Lancashire; the other is a type of wool, known as Bedford cord — which has a novel cord-like corrugated appearance — from Somerset.

The trench coat, here, is made from a heavyweight Lancashire cotton-twill in a colour known, for better or worse, as drab. Deep down, it is very traditional trench coat — full length, deep back yoke, large Prussian collar, and regulation-thickness belt and cuff-straps — but, here and there, there are small nods to the 21st century.

The limited-edition seam jacket (below) is made from a very special type of Ventile: one with a warp of unbleached cotton, and a weft of blue. The combo is one with which Ventile has never before dabbled, and the outcome is a weather-proof cotton with slub and fleck and, with all that yarn-interplay, a hue tricky to put a finger on.