Inside the Collection: Queen Elizabeth II’s Style | From Princess to Queen

 

The Indelible Style of a Queen Off Duty / "Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style" / Exhibition: The King's Gallery, Buckingham Palace

 

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The Indelible Style of a Queen Off Duty

 

A new exhibition takes a closer look at Queen Elizabeth II’s wardrobe of boots, barn coats, head scarves and tartan skirts.

 

Yola Mzizi

By Yola Mzizi

April 25, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/style/queen-elizabeth-ii-exhibition-her-life-in-style.html?searchResultPosition=1

 

Queen Elizabeth II, the longest serving British monarch, showed her nature as a sartorial strategist from the very beginning of her reign: At her coronation in 1953, she wore a gown featuring embroidered motifs that nodded to places throughout the British Commonwealth.

 

Elizabeth’s rule, which ended in 2022 when she died at 96, coincided with the ascendance of the British fashion industry. She was loyal to homegrown brands and, in 2018, her patronage was immortalized with the creation of the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design, a distinction since given annually to a rising British designer.

 

In her later decades on the throne, Elizabeth was known to favor bright, monochromatic ensembles that she accessorized with hats, brooches and a black handbag at the crook of her arm. Something of a uniform, the queen’s colorful attire seemingly reflected a philosophy that she once told a biographer: “I have to be seen to be believed.”

 

But just as indelible as Elizabeth’s rainbow attire was her selection of understated rubber boots, barn coats, head scarves and tartan skirts, items she often wore on trips to Balmoral Castle, her family’s private estate in the rural Scottish Highlands. Many of those pieces, along with others from her expansive wardrobe, are featured in a new exhibition, “Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style,” that opened at Buckingham Palace in London this month, timed to coincide with what would have been Elizabeth’s 100th birthday on April 21.

 

Elizabeth often opted for understated casual wear, like a gray Harris tweed jacket and a Balmoral tartan skirt, left, or a forest green overcoat, all of which are featured in the exhibition.Credit...Photographs by Royal Collection Enterprises Limited/Royal Collection Trust; Jon Stokes

 

Elizabeth’s casual wear typically featured neutral shades that blended in with the bucolic environments where she wore it, and it was more relaxed than the finery that she sported for public appearances. For many people, seeing how she dressed in laid-back settings held a unique allure, explained Elizabeth Holmes, the author of “HRH: So Many Thoughts on Royal Style.”

 

“Those choices feel less about how they play in public or for the photographers, and more representative of who that person is and what their style preferences are,” Ms. Holmes said.

 

The queen’s country attire also underscored her deep commitment to British fashion, said Caroline de Guitaut, the curator of the new exhibition. “It’s so British, and it’s so quintessentially the essence of some of the best clothing produced in this country,” Ms. de Guitaut said.

 

She added that the queen’s “off-duty” wardrobe was practical and inspired by her countryside pursuits — horseback riding, hunting and hiking. It included suede jackets from Simpson, Balmoral tartan skirts, Burberry capes, Barbour waxed jackets and Hermès handkerchief scarves (the rare item from a brand outside Britain).

 

The new exhibition showcases many of these garments, several of which Elizabeth routinely had repaired or altered because of frequent use, Ms. de Guitaut said. “That also goes back to the fact that she grew up during the Second World War,” she added, “where, of course, there was clothes rationing; there were shortages of things; and there was a lot of what we call the, kind of, ‘make do and mend’ philosophy.”

 

Elizabeth’s off-duty style has influenced designers in Britain and beyond. The English designer Richard Quinn — the first person to receive the queen’s namesake fashion award — said that her scarves were an inspiration for a coat in his spring 2018 collection. The Italian designers Miuccia Prada and Alessandro Michele have also nodded to the look: Mrs. Prada’s 2024 Balmoral collection for Miu Miu included tweed handbags and chore jackets, while a 2017 collection designed by Mr. Michele for Gucci featured tartan skirts and head scarves.

 

As part of the just-opened exhibition of Elizabeth’s fashion at Buckingham Palace, several British labels were tapped by its organizers to produce promotional merchandise.

 

It includes a Burberry trench coat with a dark green version of the brand’s signature check print, a homage to a style of tartan favored by the queen (2,190 pounds, or about $2,957); gloves made in collaboration with the leather-goods brand Dents (about $128); and tartan socks made in partnership with Corgi (about $24), a knitwear label that shares its name with Elizabeth’s preferred canine breed.

 

Though the queen’s casual wear incorporated luxury brands like Burberry, the fact that a person could walk into a store and buy the same boots or barn jacket owned by Elizabeth created a “personal connection to what she was wearing in a way that was accessible,” said Ms. Holmes, the author. “A lot of her other moments, especially the more glamorous ones, are not.”

"Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style" is the largest-ever exhibition of the late Queen’s fashion, held at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace from April 10 to October 18, 2026. Marking her centenary, the exhibition features over 300 items—including outfits, jewelry, and sketches—showcasing her style from childhood to her reign.

 

Key Exhibition Details

Location: The King's Gallery, Buckingham Palace (nearest station: Victoria).

Dates: April 10, 2026 – October 18, 2026.

Content: Over 300 items, including clothing worn in all ten decades of her life, from childhood to queen, including official royal news notes on "off-duty" attire.

Significance: Showcases her personal fashion archive, highlighting her active role in the design and symbolic meaning of her attire.

 

Exhibition Highlights

Garments & Accessories: Features clothing, hats, shoes, and jewelry.

Rare Items: Includes design sketches, fabric samples, and personal, handwritten correspondence.

Curator: The exhibit is curated by Caroline de Guitaut, LVO, FSA.

 

This "blockbuster" exhibition, as covered in visitlondon.com blog and NYT style section, explores how the Queen used fashion to shape her public identity.

The Old Boys: The Decline and Rise of the Public School by David Turner

The Old Boys: The Decline and Rise of the Public School by David Turner – review

An affectionate history of British public schools that fails to address the divisive elitism they represent

Jenny Turner

Thu 16 Apr 2015 07.00 BSTLast modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 14.21 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/16/the-old-boys-the-decline-and-rise-of-the-public-school-david-turner-review

Like contemplating Hamlet without the ghost: that’s what one historian calls anything about education in England that doesn’t mention the Endowed Schools Act of 1869. Before it, England had no such thing as a secondary-education system. If you were rich you might go to Eton or Rugby or Winchester or Harrow; if you were lucky you might live near a city merchant’s charitable foundation. But for most people there was nothing much at all. The 1869 act changed that by seizing the endowments that had been left, over the centuries, to the ancient grammar schools and distributing the money in what was, in some ways, a more sensible fashion: for example, by funding schools for girls. But the act also abolished provisions made for educating poor scholars completely free – this wasn’t the something-for-nothing society, this was Victorian England. And it helped split schools into three basic types, for working-class, middle-class and upper-class children – a divide, buried though governments have tried to make it, that continues to distort and disfigure the education system today.

There’s something else people need to know about the 1869 act. The heads of the endowed schools hated it, and set up a club, the Headmasters’ Conference, to defend themselves against it. It is now called the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, but it’s still the main body representing the elite education providers in Britain, the schools that, even now, can promise pupils a much better chance than average of gaining wealth, power, Ucas points, and membership of the mysterious old boys’ networks that continue to gird the globe. “More than half of the top medics, civil servants, lawyers, media figures and Conservative MPs” in Britain attended an HMC school, says David Turner, not to mention “pop stars – 22% of them, according to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission”. Worse, the very fact such privilege exists causes many people to feel that state schools, no matter how good they are, are never good enough. Academies, free schools and grammar schools, and church places, music places and places for whatever else: all spring from a sense of inadequacy that goes back decades.

Neither the Endowed Schools Act nor the Taunton Commission on grammar schools that preceded it feature much in Turner’s history of the British public school. As his title implies, he’s an old boy himself, and comes not to bury but to prod gently at the institutions that made him (the book is coy about which school he went to, so I asked his publisher: King’s College, Wimbledon; followed by St John’s College, Cambridge.) Much of the book is anecdotal and affectionate: “I have suffered indigestion from trying to understand Notions, the Winchester College argot, while lunching with the scholars”, and so on. But even when it is making more substantial arguments, the book’s basic sympathy for the public-school system – poor plucky little mites, forced on the defensive by all those brawny state schools with their vulgar A-levels – makes it quite an odd and frustrating read.

 “From the beginning,” Turner states, “I need to establish my definition of a public school.” But the definition he plumps for – “a school independent of state control which has primarily educated members of the elite” – surely isn’t right. The reason public schools were called public in the first place was precisely because they weren’t entirely independent, but regulated by the statutes of their founders: there it is on the Charity Commission website, the Kynge’s College of Our Ladye of Eton Besyde Windesore, alongside Oxfam and Save the Children, and subject to the same tax breaks, even now. Pauperes et indigentes scholares: that is what it says on the founding documents of Winchester College. These schools have charitable status because they were set up to educate poor and indigent scholars for the public good.

The earliest public schools, though, had education of the poor as only their secondary purpose. The bigger aim was to make sure there were enough priests to run the church. William of Wykeham, according to Turner, had observed how church government was broken after the 1348 Black Death: in 1379 he established New College, Oxford, to repopulate the priesthood, then added Winchester as a feeder for it in the early 1380s. The founding statute famously allowed for 70 of the “poor and needy”, but also up to 10 fee-paying “sons of noble and influential persons, special friends of the said College”. Thus the distinction between the poor-but-brainy scholars subsidised by the rich-but-dim commoners was built into the system right at the beginning.

Cruelty, corruption and cheese-paring infested these places from the very start. In 1373, Turner reports, the bishop of Norwich forbade teaching in the churches of King’s Lynn, “on the grounds that the cries of beaten pupils distracted worshippers”. Scholars at Westminster three centuries later enjoyed thrashing the commoners, “not only to bruises and bloodshed, but often even to wounds, and Scarrs, that remain al the daies of their life”. And so, across the centuries, the violence and damage went on: master-on-boy, boy-on-boy and sometimes boy-on-master. Eton experienced six “full-scale revolts” between the 1770s and 1830s and Rugby five, including one in 1797 in which boys took prisoners at swordpoint. It was after a rebellion at Marlborough in 1851, Turner says, that the headmaster hit on the idea of team sports as offering “a sublimated violence which made it an especially powerful substitute for the knightly training of earlier centuries”, not to mention as a “prophylactic against certain unclean microbes” – in other words, sex. Then, when the schools belatedly started teaching maths and science, the violence became technological. “In the 20th century, public-school boffins and leaders of men invented the tank and worked out how to use it strategically … The improvements in the curriculum made the upper class a much more effective warrior class than before.”

 Cruelty, corruption and cheese-paring infested these places from the very start

Turner used to work as the FT’s education correspondent, and his book gets more searching the closer it gets to the present day. A “golden age” came in with the 1980s as successive Thatcher governments starved the state schools while subsidising private ones with the assisted places scheme. The schools used the extra money to begin “the facilities arms race” – “You should always have a building on the go, like your knitting,” as Heather Brigstocke, the former high mistress of St Paul’s girls’ school, advised. By the time New Labour abolished assisted places in 1997, a new global elite was emerging, prepared to pay almost limitlessly for a prestigious anglophone education. International pupils made up 36% of boarders by 2014, Turner points out, with close on half of that from China and Hong Kong. Average fees are now in real terms the highest ever: £28,788 a year for boarders, £12,723 for day pupils.

As Turner says, attempts the state has made to curb the power of these schools “have generally oscillated between mild and total incompetence”. Rab Butler had the best chance ever in his great Education Act 1944, but for all sorts of disappointing reasons, he blew it: “The first-class carriage has been shunted into an immense siding,” as he later wrote. A future government, Turner suggests, might try forcing top universities to take more state-school children, thus removing the public schools’ biggest competitive advantage. But instead of that, both Labour and the Tories are currently focused on the public-benefit requirement placed on the schools by charities law. Labour proposes what Tristram Hunt has called “a School Partnership Standard … if they want to keep their business-rates relief”; the Tories have funded the Independent-State School Partnerships forum, whose website is due to go live in May. Both parties have also encouraged public schools to sponsor academies, though so far the results are not auspicious. Wellington College’s Wellington Academy was given a “Requires improvement” rating at its Ofsted inspection last year, and in 2013, Dulwich College pulled out of sponsoring the Isle of Sheppey Academy in Kent.

Strangely, neither school seems to have experienced such problems when expanding overseas: Wellington International Tianjin opened in 2011 and the Shanghai branch last year; Dulwich has franchises in Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Zhuhai, Seoul and Singapore. Strangely, too, Turner has little to say about either academies or overseas franchises, though, love them or hate them, such developments are surely what the future is all about. Instead of that, he concludes by noting that today’s public schoolboys “are cognisant of the fact that roasting boys [is] not morally acceptable”, which I suppose is always something, and that “the public schools deserve much of the credit” for teaching them “to embrace and master the modern world”.

The Old Boys by David Turner, book review

A sympathetic analysis of private education may amuse, but it fails to address the issue of inequality

James Runcie

Thursday 12 March 2015 15:00

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-old-boys-by-david-turner-book-review-10103749.html

We live in a country where the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury are all old Etonians; where public schoolboys shape more than half of Britain's "elite", and where even the entertainment industry has been taken over by toffs – Headmaster: Fry. S (Uppingham); Head Boy: Cumberbatch. B (Harrow); Senior Prefects: Redmayne. E (Eton), West. D (Eton) Lewis. D (Eton) Hiddleston. T (Eton).

If you are comfortably amused by this information, then David Turner's sympathetic history of private education may be just the ticket; but if you are worried by the long shadow of unearned entitlement, social injustice, bullying, paedophilia and casual racism present in the history of such establishments, then your response may be more nuanced.

The approach is broadly chronological, starting in the 14th century, with the big guns going first (Winchester, Eton, St Paul's; then Shrewsbury, Merchant Taylor's and Westminster). All of this is diligently done, and there are informative moments when it seems extraordinary that these schools got off the ground. The difficulty of finding teachers of sufficient quality and charging the fees necessary to sustain privilege was harder than everyone first thought.

"Another problem was more straightforward", Turner drily observes, "the public schools were beating their children too much."

An obsession with the classics at the expense of almost every other subject, a focus on sport to exhaust boys away from hormonal "vice" and an indifference towards troublesome assessment in the form of 'O' and 'A' Levels threw the future of such schools into doubt. But, as Turner tellingly points out, their hopes improved when state education became so appalling in the 1970s and 1980s and there was sufficient middle class "flight" to improve standards. This coincided with public schools finally getting their act together (mainly by admitting women) and realising that fagging and flogging were not the only means of building character.

In many ways, this book is a fascinating account of the rise of privilege, but I would have liked more context and analysis. If one is going to talk about the seed-beds of patriotism, then it might have been informative to discuss the Royal family's adoption of Gordonstoun as a favourite school; unhappiness and rebellion would have benefited from even a cursory mention of John Betjeman's Summoned by Bells or Lindsay Anderson's If; and the controversial business of charitable status, by which private schools enjoy beneficial tax advantages, is hardly mentioned.

The writer, like me, went to a public school (I went to Marlborough, Turner does not confess) and his position is more kindly than mine. I still find it bizarre that people are prepared to pay for their child's education three times over: once to the state, secondly in school fees, and then a third time for tutors to cram for re-takes. The cost is approximately one house per child (five years of secondary education at £35,000 a year is £175,000; twelve years if you start from prep school is £420,000; and as this is post tax income you might as well add 40 per cent. Even then this won't quite "do" in London.)

So why do people go through with it? It seems to me that, like business travel, the main purpose of private education is the avoidance of the poor. Set in secluded grounds, surrounded by playing fields less fortunate establishments have long since sold, public schools are havens of protection from the sordid business of getting on with people who are different. The child's upbringing is almost entirely outsourced, with mothers emailing proxy parents (otherwise known as "housemasters") to check on the progress of children they hardly see. When the little darlings do finally emerge, some 12 or 15 years later, they find jobs in politics or the law where they can still keep the poor at arm's length by sending them to prison or to war.

Staff are reassuringly, imperialistically, foreign; the divine Filipino does the cleaning, the Pole does the plumbing, the Indian the electrics and the necessarily fit and white New Zealand nanny doubles as eye candy for hubby. There's no need to meet the English working class at all. Job done. Pimms all round. Do we really want to live in such a country? And, if so, shouldn't books like this address the issue more critically?

The Old Boys: the Decline and Rise of the Public School by David Turner, review: 'a worthy effort'

Lewis Jones gets to grips with the colourful history of the British public school

4 out of 5 stars

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11469980/The-Old-Boys-the-Decline-and-Rise-of-the-Public-School-by-David-Turner.html

David Turner introduces his history of the public school with a variation on Palmerston’s gag about only three people understanding the Schleswig-Holstein question. Over the course of the past century, he jokes, “it is highly unlikely that as many as three people have understood fully what a public school is”. A former education correspondent of the Financial Times, Turner has clearly looked into the subject, but even he seems unable to supply an adequate definition.

In the beginning were the grammar schools, which taught Latin, charged fees from those who could afford them, and went in for beating. The major public schools all began as grammars. Winchester, the oldest, was founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham for 70 poor scholars, with provision for as many as 10 “commoners” (ie fee payers), and with a curriculum based entirely on “grammar” (ie Latin). In 1440 Henry VI copied Wykeham at Eton. St Paul’s was established in 1509 as a day school for 153 scholars, occasionally supplemented by commoners. The ancient grammar school at Westminster was refounded by Elizabeth I in 1560 for 40 scholars. Merchant Taylors’, another day school, was founded the next year. Rugby was established as “a free grammar school” in 1567, and Harrow as a grammar five years later.

Turner argues that they became public schools when the poor scholars were outnumbered by fee-payers. At Winchester, for example, there were as many as a hundred commoners by 1412, and by the end of the 17th century Rugby and Harrow were mainly fee-paying. But St Paul’s took only occasional fee-payers until the late 19th century, and in 1976 Dulwich (founded in 1619) had 85 per cent of its places funded by local authority scholarships. His other criterion is that a public school educates “the nation rather than just local people”, but that would obviously exclude the day schools.

It may not be possible fully to understand what a public school is, but we know one when we see one, and there is a clear distinction between public and merely private schools, which are often more disreputable, and short-lived.

Turner’s subtitle echoes Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, and the more entertaining sections of The Old Boys cover the era of decline in the 18th and early 19th centuries – the days of corruption, fag-roasting and riots. The Winchester mutiny of 1710, over beer rations, was followed by five more; there were six at Eton, and five at Rugby. At Rugby in 1797 the Riot Act was read, and rebellion was suppressed by soldiers, special constables and farmers with horsewhips.

Even after Thomas Arnold’s headmastership of Rugby (1828-42), which reformed not just his school but all of them (23 of his masters became heads of other schools), in 1864 the Clarendon Commission judged that public-school education was generally bad, though not as bad as it had been. At Christ Church, Oxford, which then took more than a third of its undergraduates from Eton, and about 10 per cent each from Harrow and Winchester, the dons reported: “The answers we get to simple grammar questions are very inaccurate.”

Turner does not shirk the topic of homosexuality – “little pretty white-handed curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows” (Tom Brown’s Schooldays) – and nor does he neglect the girls’ schools, with an account of how the Girls’ Public Day School Company (now Trust) was launched by four feminists at the Albert Hall in 1872. At Roedean, established in London in 1885, but soon moved to a windswept hill outside Brighton, the headmistress promised that “special pains will be taken to guard against overwork”, and the headmistress of Wycombe Abbey (1896) similarly guaranteed that the “hours of study will be strictly limited”.

In the Sixties, Empire and snobbery were on the wane, academic education was free at the grammar schools, and the public schools were in trouble. Then they were rescued by the Labour Party. In 1965 Anthony Crosland (whom Turner calls a Wykehamist, though actually he went to Highgate) set about abolishing the grammar schools, a mistake compounded by the abolition of direct grant schools in 1976, when most of them became public schools. Public school pupils accordingly rose from 4.4 per cent of the school population in 1977 to 6.2 per cent in 1981.

William Dawson, headmaster of Brighton College from 1906 to 1933, was once asked by his head boy why he admitted foreigners. He explained that he took two years’ fees in advance as surety for good behaviour: “They’re all highly sexed, and it’s only a matter of months before they sleep with a maid. Then out they go.” In recent decades fees have tripled in real terms, and since the crash the professional classes can no longer afford them, so the schools that began by being colonised by the indigenous rich are now overrun by Russians and Chinese.

And it’s a two-way process. Dulwich has three schools in China, and others in South Korea and Singapore. Haileybury has an outpost in Kazakhstan, and Harrow in – where else? – Bangkok. This, apparently, is the golden age.

Turner dutifully rehearses the somewhat tired arguments for and against the schools. He notes that “opponents attack the public schools for isolating their charges from native working-class culture”. Supporters presumably defend them on the same grounds. Others may wonder what native working-class culture is, to which the approved answer is: pop music.

According to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, though, 22 per cent of pop stars were educated at public school, which if true is quite the most shocking statistic in the book. The next most shocking is that the percentage of public-school Tory MPs has fallen from 70 per cent in 1983 to 54 per cent in 2010.

But there is never any real doubt whether Turner regards the schools as “dangerously dominant or benignly pre-eminent”, and for as long as 10 per cent of comprehensive school pupils take media studies at A-level many parents will agree with him.

The Old Boys is a worthy effort, but I could have done with less editorialising and more history.

Living Like Harry Potter - A Day At Boarding School

 

In memoriam : Godfather of the Row: Angus Cundey, MBE. 1937-2024

 

Godfather of the Row: Angus Cundey, MBE. 1937-2024

https://savilerow-style.com/news/godfather-of-the-row-angus-cundey-mbe-1937-2024/

 

Angus Cundey, known affectionately as The Godfather of Savile Row and the driving force behind Henry Poole & Co for many years, has died after a short illness. He was 87. The company, now headed by his son Simon, made the following announcement earlier this week: “It is with a very heavy heart that we share this message. After a short battle with cancer, Angus H Cundey MBE, the sixth generation to lead our family business, passed away peacefully at his home on August 12.

 

“He lived and breathed Henry Poole, built special relationships with clients, and was fond of and proud of the skills of all the staff and of their achievements in making Henry Poole what it is today: one of the finest tailors in the world. He was called “the Godfather of Savile Row” as he fought continuously to achieve the Row’s global recognition, its protection and preservation. He was the chairman of trade-related organisations such as the FMT in Europe, the SRB and the BTBA. He was much loved by the trade and all the people involved in it, and was honoured with an MBE for his services to the industry. He leaves a legacy and will be greatly missed by all of us. Rest in peace.”

 

A few hours later, Savile Row Bespoke said: “Our deepest condolences go to the family, friends and team at Henry Poole. RIP The Godfather of Savile Row.”

 

It was back in 2018 that Angus Cundey was presented with an MBE by The Queen for his services to bespoke tailoring and trade charities. He acquired many accolades throughout his illustrious career and was a past president of the Federation of Merchant Tailors, Chairman World Congress of Master Tailors 1973, President Master Tailors Benevolent Association and a founder of Savile Row Bespoke.

 

In an interview with Savile Row Style Magazine back in 2016, he told one of his favourite stories – that, until his headmaster put him right a few weeks before he left school in 1954, he knew hardly anything about Henry Poole. “When I was about 17, my headmaster [at Framlingham College] summoned me to his study and said: ‘Now Cundey what are you going to do when you leave at the end of the term?’. I replied that I was going into the RAF as I wanted to learn how to fly, but he said, ‘Cundey have you not heard of your wonderful family business, the most famous tailors in the world?’”

 

Although Angus and his sister regularly came up to London in school holidays to see their father at work, Samuel Cundey never explained that Henry Poole was the family business and that Angus could be the sixth generation of the family to work there. Luckily for tailoring, the young Angus had time to mull over his future on the train heading back to London at the end of that final school term. “I sat there thinking: do I really want to be a pilot or a tailor? When I got out at Liverpool Street I asked my father, will there be a place for me at Henry Poole? A great big smile came across his face and he said, ‘of course’.”

 

And Angus was very supportive of Stewart Lee, publisher of Savile Row Style Magazine, when he wanted to launch his own gin brand – Savile Row Gin. “I had a heart stopping moment,” recalled Stewart. “The whole project depended on getting the whole-hearted support of Savile Row tailors. At lunch at Brown’s I told Angus Cundey about it, and for the longest ten seconds of my life, he took a deep pause…He cocked his head to one side and then said yes, he thought it was a wonderful idea.”

 

Naturally, Stewart was keen to pass on his words of sympathy to the family. “Angus was The Godfather but also the Gentleman of Savile Row,” he said. “It was an honour and a pleasure to have got to know him over many years. Sending my sincere condolences to all the family. The world of bespoke tailoring has lost one of its finest.”

David Saxby talking about Tweed - Men's Style

 

Rescuing a true "Aristocrat" in distress . John G. Hardy / "Hacking Jacket" ...

I found this superb true "HACKING JACKET" fit for any "tweedy" circumstance in a lost and forgotten place ... I heard his voice calling in the middle of the greatest chaos ... Oh sublime moment of encountering ... rescuing a true "aristocrat" from oblivion !
Yours JEEVES/ António Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho.

 THE HISTORY OF JOHN G HARDY CLOTH

http://tweed-jacket.blogspot.nl/2007/12/history-of-john-g-hardy-cloth.html

Almost 100 years ago John G Hardy founded the company which today holds the undisputed position of market leader for the supply of elegant country fabrics. The founder, being something of an eccentric gentleman, became well known for having collected his fabric samples, he would return to London with them stacked under his top hat. He was on of the first cloth merchants to visit the Scottish Highlands and Islands, accordingly acclaiming to have been responsible for the introduction of both Shetland and Harris Tweed cloths to the major markets of the world.

In 1829 the Duke of York, who was to become His Majesty King George VI, used a John G Hardy cloth for the regimental Tweed of the Brigade of Guards. He was the Colonel in Chief of the regiment and the cloth consisted of Black and White, with Royal Blue and Crimson colourations.

King Edward VIII when, as the Prince of Wales, was known to acquire the distinct checked fabric that would later bear the name from John G Hardy. Today, the extensive fabric range still includes several Prince of Wales checks and the expression has become instantly definable.

The company is privileged to hold Royal Warrants granted in the mid 1930’s for the supply of Balmoral Tweed fabric to the Royal Household.

For the discerning purchaser John G Hardy offers a vast array of jacketings and trouserings for all occasions, including the famous Alsport Tweed. Based in Yorkshire, the heart of the UK textile industry, the company enjoys an enviable reputation as one of the worlds foremost cloth houses with its fabrics being sold in over 50 countries throughout the world.

Bookster now offer an introduction to John G Hardy Cloths with six new offerings of light medium and heavy weight Alsport Tweeds. More lightweight patterns will be on offer in the New Year.

http://www.tweed-jacket.com/