On one side, it's either a luxury flecked wool-cashmere from the Cotswolds or cord from Lancashire. On the other, warm wool-melton. And, sandwiched between, a sensible amount of quilting. It’s the v-neck vest: the first garment off the line at the new factory in North London.
The first cloth — the one pictured on this page — is a charcoal wool-cashmere: the same, pleasingly flecked medley of black and grey used this time last year. Exemplary stuff, sourced from a mill in the south-west. The other cloth is a ten-wale cord, cut horizontally rather than vertically. Made by a mill in Lancashire, north-west England, from high-grade cotton, it has a cut-pile weave construction of a specification unchanged in decades.
All would be for nought, of course, were what is commonly called a “body-warmer” not body-warming. This isn’t a responsibility the vest shirks. Hard-quilted as it is in East London, with one of the aforementioned cloths on one side and the warmest of meltons on the other, it has fortitude baked right in. Extra-strength stitching and robust herringbone cotton binding, meanwhile, guarantee there’ll be no bursting at any seams.
Two “up-and-under” pockets, concealed with a seam-to-seam fold, and five real horn buttons finish the job. The buttons are dark matte tortoiseshell in colour, a fair size, and this time very, very subtly marked with random flecks of grey — they’re a deadstock quality helpfully pulled from the archives by the ever-excellent Midlands button maker. Both the wool-cashmere and corduroy versions of the vest are in the shop from today.
