The Gentleman Mason

Time for Tweed

Bookster Nevis Tweed Suit

I’ll be honest with you.  I hate summer.

I know most of you won’t agree with me, but the summer for me is terrible.  It’s always too hot, this year being a pleasant exception.  I don’t golf.  Baseball burned its last bridge with me following the latest strike, and the Premier League has been in recess.  Even Formula 1 is taking a month off in the middle of the season.

I don’t really come into my own until the fall.  I love the fall and the winter, I love that first cold day, I love the way the air smells, I love the fall colors and the fall foods.  I also get to break out my favorite clothes, the ones I’ve hidden away all summer long because it’s just too blasted hot to wear them, my tweeds.

I love the tweeds and everything that goes with them, tattersall shirts, wool ties, flat caps and fedoras, clunky shoes & boots, the whole ensemble.

The English consider tweed a country fabric.  They make this odd distinction between those items that are worn in the country, in the city and in The City, and never should they intersect.  As the slogan goes, Never Brown in Town.  Not brown suits, not brown hats, and certainly not, my dear fellows, brown shoes.  It simply isn’t done.

Bertie Wooster in brown flannel

Well, for as English as I am at heart, I simply cannot abide any proscription against brown, particularly as it applies to tweed and flannel suits.  As you can see, our dear friend Wooster agrees with me.  Of course, Bertie has been known to clip the occasional rule, and in his defense he is at the train station about to depart for the country in an ensemble laid out by his man Jeeves.  And Jeeves is never wrong about clothing.  Or much of anything else.  But I digress.

My favorite tweed peddler is a fellow named Peter King, who along with his lovely wife Michele,  runs a business in the UK called Bookster.  (Peter has the most English mailing address in all of recorded history:  Woodfields Cottage, Weston under Penyard, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire.)  In his other lives, Peter has literally written the book on raising cattle, and something I didn’t know until about five minutes ago — once managed a reggae band.  And now he’s doing a brisk business in some marvelous tweed.

Peter and Michele are two of the best and most patient people on the planet with whom to do business and they supply me with wonderful things like two tweed suits currently hanging in my closet beside a tweed overcoat, another more formal coat currently in production in their shops, a few pairs of moleskin trousers, and, although they don’t know it yet, soon another suit not unlike Bertie’s which is going to be a birthday present to myself.

Here’s the problem you’ll have dealing with a company like Bookster:  You’re here, they’re there.  They don’t travel as other tailors we’ve discussed do.  Unless you’re willing to hop a plane to England and a train to Herefordshire, they’re not measuring you.  (And maybe they’re not measuring you if you do, I can’t say whether they even provide that service.)  You really need a good sense of your own dimensions when you order from Peter and Michele, and be willing to possibly have a bit of alteration done when the garment is delivered.  The effort is worthwhile for the hardcore Anglophile however, the result being a very traditional British garment made from superb British cloth, cut and sewn by British tailors.  In Britain.  And at remarkably modest prices, particularly with the currently favourable exchange rate.

Serious tweed is not the simplest thing in the world for an American fellow with very odd dimensions to source.  Perhaps it’s  particularly difficult in Indiana and far simpler in other parts of the country, if you have good sources please let me know.  But I do love my tweed, and what a joy it is to receive a big box full of the stuff from across the pond.