Suits you sir: A man of the cloth

A suit says authority, learning, expertise, manners, probity, efficiency, trust and a certain formality

The suit evolved for military and riding kit that awkwardly left it with residual, useless buttons on the cuff, receding lapels, pointless pocket flaps and a lot of weird rules.

The suit has been so remarkably successful not because it is particularly well-suited to its many careers — it isn’t efficient, practical or comfortable, but it does come with pockets full of assumptions that are understood in every language and culture.

A suit says authority, learning, expertise, manners, probity, efficiency, trust and a certain formality; all attributes traditionally thought of as British. As they used to say on Madison Avenue: “Think Yiddish, dress Briddish.”

You can make suits out of all sorts of stuff: cotton, rayon, linen, silk… But the best suits are made from wool. Britain’s story, its image, is wrapped and warped in wool. Wool paid for the 100 Years War, built the industrial mills of Yorkshire and the borders, as well as the smug manners and boastful churches of the Cotswolds. It was wool that cleared the Highlands, stole the common land and enclosed it with hedges. Britain’s stake money to play at the table of greatness and Empire was made from wool, and in recognition of this the Lord Chancellor, in his pomp, sits on a woolsack.

Wool can be woven into a gallimaufry of cloths: calamanco, drap de Berry, shoddy, drugget, duffle, flannel, hodden, linsey, melton, serge, tricot, wadmal, worsted, zephyr… But the greatest of all, for which the grandest sheep can aspire to give the coat off its back, is tweed.

I have a bit of a thing for tweed. I love its feel and its smell, I love that it’s rough but homely, that it has the ability to deflect the elements with a jaunty nonchalance. Tweed is like a game terrier; always pleased to see you, always wants to go out, always optimistic. In tweed you walk farther, breathe deeper. Merely sprightly grows jaunty. Tweed silently hums Charlie is My Darling and The Road to the Isles. It is the perfect balance of utility and panache, and it is my secret vice. Well, not so secret. It’s difficult to keep tweed a secret. I have drawers full of bolts that are curled up, nascent suits, coats, chaos and plus fours. So, when a man with a pinstriped, flannel voice called to ask would I perhaps consider designing my own tweed and have it made into, say, a suit by, say, Anderson & Sheppard… Well, I said, I’ll have to think about it. And then squealed like a big girl.

Tweed is a parable, a stereotype of Britishness. We are tweedy. Tweed is taciturn and hardworking, sturdy, dependable, loyal. Tweed doesn’t get soppy or go limp. It fits with the familiarity of first-name terms, and it always has a mint, a penknife and a pebble in its pocket.

The history of tweed begins, like so much history, with a misunderstanding. Though the name plainly comes from the river that rolls darkly along the border between England and Scotland, it is most likely an English mishearing of a Scots weaver saying “twill”, that he’d have pronounced “tweel”. Tweed is a twill cloth made with a rib; the weft thread goes over two warp threads and then under two, giving a diagonal pattern that can be made into things like houndstooth and herringbone by adding a step. (I’m just passing this on, I don’t really understand what it means.)

Unlike ordinary woven fabric, twill has a front and a back with a distinct texture that makes it hang particularly well. It originates from Scotland, with the introduction of the Cheviot sheep, which gave a particularly fine, strong wool. Where Scotland had traditionally grazed skinny cattle, sheep produced more meat, and a double income.

The dark, indigenous Scottish sheep was traditionally used for the old Hebridean Harris tweed, a mix of natural brown or black and white wool, woven to create the original tweed pattern, “shepherd’s check”, and was used to wrap newborn lambs. But Scottish tweed is, like so many things, really an English desire, and surprisingly modern.

AA Gill mulling over his choice of tweed at Anderson & Sheppard (Steve Schofield and Tom Craig)

When the clan system collapsed in the middle of the 18th century, and the wearing of tartan was banned, and the chieftains wanted no more of this old, sad song, they sold their clansmen for sheep and their traditional fiefdoms to the English aristocracy with new industrial money, and to a surprising number of brewers, collectively known as the “beerage”, for sporting estates. The most valuable tenants in the Highlands turned out not to be crofters or shepherds, but grouse and deer. Out of the bankruptcy and grieving, a new romantic, sentimental Scottishness was embroidered.

The Anglo-lairds wanted to dress up on holiday. They invented estate tweed, using the new wool from the new sheep, from the new mills. It imitated tartan, with checks and patterns that were identified with places, and then families and estates. All your retainers and servants, the stalkers and gillies, were kitted out in your particular tweed. The first, Glen Feshie, was woven in 1841. The patterns and colours grew more expressionistic as bored, aristocratic wives got artistic, like kittens in a knitting shop.

A suit that looks like clown’s pyjamas in a drawing room may well disappear into the heather at 50 yards

Originally, wool was dyed with the mosses and lichens and peat of the country it grazed over. A particular creamy yellow came from sheep that had been covered in butter and tar to help them make it through the winter. But the accidental discovery of mauveine, and aniline dyeing, arrived in the 1860s, then there was no holding back the hue and dye.

Tweed grew strident and exuberant. Scottish mills and shops offered a bespoke service where a man would come to your estate with his swatches and watercolour box, and accompanied by the laird and his wife would mix a tweed that would blend in to your craggy acres.

A suit that looks like clown’s pyjamas in a drawing room may well disappear into the heather at 50 yards.

The Lovat mixture, a particularly subtle and beautiful blue-green, contains half a dozen colours that Lord Lovat is said to have noticed on a bosky bank in spring.

The madly dashing Lord Elcho designed a hodden brown-grey tweed that had for years made working men’s cloth caps and capes and was worn all over Scotland. Because he was raising the London-Scottish regiment, and didn’t want to use a particular clan tartan, he perceptively said that a soldier was a man-hunter and, like a deer-stalker, should blend in with the landscape. This hodden cloth is the origin of khaki and all military camouflage.

The consequence of both the Duke and his gillie wearing the same suit meant tweed grew to be a democratic cloth. The colonel and the private, the weekend plutocrat and communist intellectual all wear it. Look at photographs of the football crowds of the 1930s, the Jarrow marchers, the enlistment queues of 1914… They are furrowed fields of tweed caps just like the Royal princes wore.

Tweed is Scottish, occasionally Irish. I had never heard of English tweed until I got the call from Fox Brothers, who weave the stuff in Wellington, Somerset. They are one of the oldest woollen manufacturers in Britain, officially founded in 1772. Along the way they invented flannel, and Douglas Cordeaux is their current managing director. Would I, he asked, like to come and see the mill where they would make my tweed?

The factory sits on the quiet, untidy edge of this little triumphalist town. It is vast, like some ancient henge, a brick-built lump of Victorian industrial muscle; beautiful for its steepling, russet self-confidence, a great temple to the warp and weft of Mammon and commerce. And it is completely silent. The mechanical crash of hundreds of looms echoes on the caw of rooks. The windows, through which the sunlight would have caught the falling snow of dancing woollen chaff, are boarded up, the doors padlocked.

Most of the cloth made here was military: 852 miles of Lord Elcho’s new khaki were supplied to the Ministry of Defence in the Great War to make puttees. In its day this place must have surged with thousands of workers, hundreds of looms, the air heavy with din and cash. After 20 minutes looking round for a living soul, we found what is left of Fox Brothers: an outbuilding with half a dozen Morris Minor weaving machines worked by a score of dedicated weavers. Still, the rhythmic clatter is like being at a conceptual heavy-metal concert.

Left, a tailor takes Gill’s measure and right, a weaver at Fox Brothers (Steve Schofield, Tom Craig)

Weaving is one of the most ancient human trades, its principles as old as civilization. The process remains unchanged, but the machines that make the cloth have a fearsome complexity: hundreds and hundreds of threads, the flying shuttle, the myriad hooks that grab the spools that reel the dozens of cogs and levers that know their place.

All the moving parts are as temperamental as performing fleas. They shudder and clunk, and slowly the cloth becomes visible a line at a time. This is immensely skilled work, constantly checking tensions, mending broken threads. A moment’s inattention can cost a thumb or an arm.

The tweed produced here is as fine and beautiful as any I’ve seen from Scotland. They use the wool from West Country sheep; hard and durable. But what is really astonishing about this place are its records. The great ledgers of orders and samples go back to before Jane Austen.

Teetering piles of swatches line corridors to the ceiling. Dusty, uncollated, uncounted, they are cloth cliffs, a geology of fashion and taste. Pulled out at random, these are culture fossils, hinting of glimpses into the way we once were. Those moments of exuberance and boldness, and the years of dark probity.

The checks run through them like graphs of prosperity and hardship. Dauntingly, you see the possibilities of tweed are endless. The threads of wool are as numerous as notes of music. These mills were great mechanical organs beating out the solid rhythms and folk tunes of British life.

Back in London, I’ve decided: my tweed is going to be urban. A town tweed Back in London, I’ve decided: my tweed is going to be urban. A town tweed. Tweeds are from the country, their colours and purposes are earthy and rural, but I want an estate tweed for housing estates. I’m given a woolly palette of natural colours and told to get on with it, and I begin by having a fatwa on tweed.

I can’t look at any more. It’s too confusing, too intimidating, so I just go for a walk, and look through my lashes at the city, trying to see it as a landscape of valleys and cliffs, sun-bright vistas and distant, charcoal peaks and escarpments, and to imagine a cloth that will blend into this natural environment.

The town is much lighter than I expected. The dark concrete and the Tarmac shine in the flat light, particularly when they’re wet. And there is far less brick than you’d imagine. I live in Chelsea, and there’s a lot of white stucco, york stone pavements of lovely shades of fawn and sienna. I’m ignoring the strident dabs of colour, like telephone boxes and buses, and make an early aesthetic decision to veto yellow lines. It’s a hellish colour to wear unless you’re a Chinese emperor, and too jokily obvious for a town tweed. And I’m surprised at how much blue there is; road signs, in the smoky blue of exhausts, teal and metallic blue in the shadows. Then I go and do some extemporary drawing on an iPad, which turns out to be rather good for this. I use my children’s crayon application to make dozens of impressionistic smudges with my fingers, rub them out, compare them, combine them and email them to the tweed-makers. It is quick and invigorating.

The first series of ideas that come back are a disappointment. I put a line of mauve in some of the drawings, partly as a nod to the original aniline dye and partly as an echo of the absent heather. But the designs all look like the Queen Mother’s purple-and-blue picnic rug.

I decide on a type of weave, an unusual diamond pattern, where you might expect a dogtooth. And then comes a blanket, like a quilt, with 20-odd variations on a theme, all fugues on my design. The range and subtlety is wonderful, the choice horrible. But one stands out as being conspicuously what I’d set out to make: a tweed that looks like the city, while still being in harmony with its august country ancestors.

It is sent back to the mill to be woven, and then to Huddersfield to be finished. Finishing is an ancient and ridiculously skilled job to get just the right nap and softness on the cloth. I’ve chosen a heavy tweed because they drape much better across the body, particularly in trousers.

A couple of months later, I get a call from Anderson & Sheppard. My finished cloth has arrived, would I like to come in and discuss the suit? I’m out of the door before they hang up.

I unroll the bolt of cloth in the window and can’t see it for looking. I’m surrounded by disturbingly suave tailors who each take an expert finger and thumb to my material. Each wears an expression of mild surprise. Tailors train their faces to show no more than mild anything. Extremes of emotion are bad for business.

“Well,” says John Hitchcock, the head cutter. “I think that’s a very nice bit of tweed. Very nice indeed,” he adds for rare emphasis. And I see it. It really is a very nice bit of tweed. A very, very nice bit of tweed. The check of blue, with a cross of faint mauve, a touch of urban green and the york stone, and the warm, dark grey diamond. I’ve held first copies of books I’ve written. None has given me as deep a satisfaction as the thrill of this tweed. I’m hopeless with my hands, at crafty things, but here is a made thing from a great tradition of made things, of beautiful cloth. And I made it, and it isn’t an embarrassment, it’s fine.

They can do it for you, too, if you have £5,000 to spare. The minimum order for bespoke tweed from Fox Brothers is 15 metres — enough for two suits and two caps or another pair of trousers to be run up for you by Anderson & Sheppard.

My suit is traditional three-piece, with three buttons. It’s comfortable and confident, with the characteristic Anderson & Sheppard cut. It hangs well and moves well, and it elicits glances rather than stares. In the 1930s, Anderson & Sheppard would make 500 suits a week, and a great many of them would be tweed. Now there are fewer, and the percentage of tweed has fallen to very few. We should wear more tweed. In a monochrome-suited world, tweed is individual, and as colourful as you dare to go. It won’t let you look like a city drone or an office clone, and it is as close as we will ever come to a national costume, as culturally indigenous as the Masai’s red toga, the Buddhist’s saffron robe, or the cowboy’s Stetson. Tweed is who we are.

I walked down Savile Row and Bond Street. It was Valentine’s Day. The pavement was full of girls wearing secret smiles. I took the suit to have tea. The next day I was forwarded this tweet by someone called Harriet Evans, who appears to be a lady novelist. “Saw AA Gill having tea by himself in the Wolseley, in a loud tweed suit with a Tiffany bag next to him, like a villain in an Agatha Christie.” You couldn’t get more perfectly, satisfyingly British than that.