September 2015 — March 2016
One of the many things you can make with about four yards of heavy worsted duffle cloth, four handmade horn toggles, and a few feet of jute rope is a duffle coat. It is, on the face of it, a mostly traditional sort of duffle, but there are a few breaks with tradition: most notably the part-inset, part-raglan split-shoulder construction.
It stands to reason that the balmacaan, being colloquial in places hilly and remote in Scotland for “walking coat”, wouldn’t look much out of place in the Highlands: heavy herringbone tweed, deep welt pockets, collar which goes all the way over the chin. Not unwelcome when the going gets drizzly here in the lowlands, either.
In its default state, the hat — felted and blocked in England — looks rather like a bowler. Pinch, push, or pull the crown, though, and you have a fedora, a homburg, or any shape of your invention. The nature of the felt is unique, see, in that it can be moulded, again and again, before being popped back into its initial bowler style.
The peacoat is an annual exercise in finding the very best heavy tweeds from across the British Isles. This time around comes a birdseye tweed from the Inner Hebrides in Scotland: a fifty-fifty split of dark-brown yarn from local Hebridean sheep in the flush of youth, and a silver-grey yarn from pension-collecting ones.
These here gloves are made by hand in the centuries-old crucible of English glove-making: a place which has cut and sewn deerskin into finger-shaped form since George III was a lad. They are hand-stitched — an undertaking of some six hours — and are lined with very fine cashmere, knitted in the Scottish Borders.
These gloves, meanwhile, though they too are deerskin, and made though they are by the same such venerable glove-maker, have a back of organic box-tweed, which is woven with the undyed yarn of three breeds of sheep, in the Inner Hebrides. It the same tweed, indeed, as the SB2 jacket worn here and, an all-grey variant, below.
The SB2 jacket has one button more than the SB1, and one fewer than the SB3. It is worn here with matching standard trousers — both are made with grey-brown three-sheep twill from the Inner Hebrides — and a melange-twill cotton shirt, with the button-loop Kelly collar.
This is a frame for spectacles, made in London from cotton acetate and gold. They are made by hand, and are the result of over one-hundred mostly very difficult and precise operations — from carving and filing and buffing the front, to bumping the bridge, to coiling the 14-karat cable-sides on a machine invented in 1933.
The hood jacket has never been more winter-ready — made as it is with a new type of cloth from the water-haters at Ventile in Lancashire: a luggage-weight variety of their classic weather-proof cotton, equivalent in heft to 15oz canvas, but with all the same hydrophobic super-abilities as standard strains of Ventile.
From the Heavy Woollen District of West Yorkshire, for the second successive year, comes this wool-merino twill. Both jacket (the SB3 variety) and trouser (the standard type) made with the cloth have a clever knack of being supremely soft and warm — that will be the merino part of the blend — and pleasingly resistant to creasing.
The novelty with the reversible overshirt is not that it is reversible, nor that it is made with diamond twill from West Yorkshire, nor that it has six pockets unnoticeable to all but the most perseverant frisker, nor that its shape is balanced to a degree so perpendicular you can play billiards off the chest. No — it is its reversible buttons.
