I like to think I know a bit about designing tweed. Almost 25
years ago I designed a range of tweeds in collaboration with
Country Life: a light moss green with heather windowpane
over check and a slightly more elaborate Glen check using the same
palette. Mirabile dictu, the weights were about 21oz and
17oz respectively — in those distant pre-Thunberg days, the U.K.
could still be a bit nippy in winter, and so a three-piece
suit in a bullet-stopping fabric only slightly less cumbersome than
roofing felt was still a viable proposition. Those tweeds were
ordered from the old Hunters of Brora mill and made up at Hackett,
where Terry had just opened the bespoke department.
When Terry moved to Huntsman in the late 1990s, I got my eye in
on various coat-lengths of vintage tweeds left knocking around in
the basement — exaggerated windowpane checks with monstrous repeats
about the size of a paperback book. These were supplemented with
finds from the bowels of Savile Row, otherwise known as W. Bill,
then a subterranean warren of fabrics that brought to mind the
descriptions of Mr. Suddaby’s bookshop in Howard Springs’s 1940
novel, Fame is the Spur.
More recently I have used Huntsman’s bespoke tweed designing
software, introduced by Pierre Lagrange, to create a fabulous
check, and before then I admit to having employed tactical voting
in the annual Huntsman tweed designing competition to ensure that
even if I did not win, the result went the right way.
With Terry it is altogether less formal: he plants the seed of
an idea in the mind much in the manner that Leonardo DiCaprio did
in the sci-fi film Inception, and then allows one to
believe that the notion was all one’s own and that he is merely
happy to help as an amanuensis, a sort of sartorial midwife. It is
quite brilliant, really. (Given that Terry does not have the
hyper-modern software to modify checks with the click of a mouse or
the flick of a cursor — Kent, Haste and Lachter’s I.T. division is
still trying to work out how the fax machine operates — it was a
little more old school and a lot less precise.)
The creative process — if we can dignify with such a name my
popping in to give guidance and find pictorial references on my
iPhone — was frustrating enough for me, so I can only imagine how
it affected Haddon and Suyamba , Terry’s understudies whom he had
assigned to handle this project. Once a week for about five months
I would waltz in, express a desire for a more duck-egg blue here, a
less intensely ferrous rust there, a more lichen-like mossy green
elsewhere, and demonstrate huge areas of indecision everywhere
else.
Read the full story in Issue 68 of The Rake - on
newsstands 6th February. Subscribe here.
