Snappy Dressers: The Ultimate Collaboration Between N.Peal and Hollywood Authentic
If you thought channelling the spirit of Jeffrey ‘the Dude’ Lebowski and Marilyn Monroe in the same piece of clothing would be impossible, you hadn’t reckoned with a cashmere collaboration between N.Peal and Hollywood Authentic.
The phrase ‘Hollywood photographer’ feels more than a little tepid when it comes to Greg Williams. We’re talking here about a man who, behind the scenes on 150- plus movie sets, has trained his camera on stars including Joaquin Phoenix, Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Idris Elba and Timothée Chalamet; who has shot four Bond franchise posters; and whose access to the Baftas, Golden Globes and Academy Awards has yielded a treasure trove of semi-candid moments with the A-list elite — part reportage, part portraiture.
Williams’s Hollywood Authentic magazine is precisely what its name implies: a platform that gets to the heart of film performers’ true selves, in the process adding finer brushstrokes to the existential realities behind their onscreen performances.
So what links Williams — who worked as a photojournalist covering war zones in Burma, Chechnya and Sierra Leone before entering the world of entertainment — with N.Peal, the purveyors of fine cashmere goods, established as a men’s haberdashery in Burlington Arcade in 1936? Over to Adam Holdsworth, the son of a Bradford wool merchant, who joined the family business in 1989 and purchased N.Peal in 2006.
“By the 1950s, the brand’s reputation for outstanding cashmere was such that it had captured the attention of Hollywood,” Holdsworth tells The Rake. “We have this amazing newspaper article in the N.Peal archive about [the brand’s founder] Nat Peal hand-carrying a ‘soft white’ cashmere sweater to the U.S. for Marilyn Monroe.” N.Peal’s ivory cashmere cable-knit turtleneck, named ‘the Blonde’ as a tribute to Monroe, is influenced by another, markedly contrasting individual: Jeff Bridges’ the Dude in The Big Lebowski.
“That article goes on to list N.Peal’s customers from the previous year,” Holdsworth continues, “including Elizabeth Taylor, Vivian Blaine and Ava Gardner, whose love of cashmere was such that the article goes on to say, ‘Miss Gardner bought eight Cashmeres on her last visit’. Jackie Kennedy was also an N.Peal customer, and its roll call of clients from the silver screen also included Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. Nat Peal himself once declared, ‘Movie stars will come to us even during a bad day. Sophia Loren consoled herself in buying cashmere when her jewels were stolen.’”
Princess Grace of Monaco and Lady Diana would later become close acquaintances of Peal’s, but it’s the friendships Peal forged with Hollywood’s elite, among whom he was known as the ‘British King of Cashmere’, that have defined a brand that, following Holdsworth’s takeover in 2006, produced garments that have appeared in Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die.
Elsewhere in the collection, a bright red crew-neck pays homage to the varsity sweater (whose jacket equivalent’s prominence in movies from The Breakfast Club to Beverly Hills Cop to Baby Driver pretty much earns it its own IMDb page), while the Holster — an ultra- soft, ultra-versatile roll-neck — calls to mind Steve McQueen in Bullitt or Jean-Paul Belmondo injecting his brooding sartorial nous into French New Wave cinema.
Those wanting to channel McQueen — or, for that matter, Paul Newman or Alain Delon — might also opt for the Icon shawl, a ribbed cardigan named after its collar, while female superheroes from Wonder Woman to Catwoman are given a wink in the slim- fit funnel-neck emblazoned with the image of the Hollywood Authentic Supercat. There’s also a T-shirt bearing the phrase ‘Hollywood Authentic Magazine’ (a playful nod to the ‘New York Herald Tribune’ T-shirt worn by Jean Seberg in the 1960 French New Wave crime drama Breathless).
“I approached Greg and explained I was planning a collection that was inspired by N.Peal’s list of legendary customers,” Holdsworth says of the collection’s inception. “I asked whether he would be open to shooting it, but, unbeknownst to me at the time, Greg had been working with his wife, Eliza Cummings, on a whole bunch of designs inspired by the Golden Age of cinema. It was quite an extraordinary and exciting moment."
“Greg is very much an ideas machine, so we had a lot of fun creating the collection, but importantly N.Peal have a history of creating beautiful garments of exceptional quality for men and women. So this collection was about blending luxury and heritage. We had lots of ideas and worked on a number of different pieces. Obviously, when you’re working on an autumn-winter collection, that naturally dictates fabrics, etc, but ultimately we wanted this collection to be a modern take on classic shapes — fashion touchstones that are timelessly elegant.”
Williams, also talking exclusively to The Rake, points out that there’s a tasteful, tongue-in-cheek irreverence to the collection. “We’ve tried to put a smile on the whole thing,” he says. “Some of the stuff we’ve made — the pieces that say Hollywood on them, for instance — they’re almost like souvenirs, but they’re incredibly luxurious cashmere souvenirs. And I like that side of it.”
Williams talks passionately about various pieces in the collection — not least the Femme Fatale (“It’s very much based on a sort of cashmere ballet suit that Liz Taylor wore,” he says) — but cites the Monroe-meets-the-Dude piece as his favourite. “There’s a tongue-in-cheek element in the detailing: the directors’ chairs, film lights, cameras, film strips around the waist. It’s almost like a memento for those practitioners who work within the industry. I can see people rocking it on set, and other people on set saying, ‘Where’d you get that?’”
This is a collection that sees The Rake’s two main spheres of interest collide. And we are already hungry for more.
