The Anatomy of an Autumn Wardrobe

The most famous car chase in cinema was filmed with its hero in a tweed jacket.

In Bullitt, released in October 1968, Steve McQueen spends the best part of ten minutes throwing a green Mustang over the hills of San Francisco. What he wears for it is a brown herringbone tweed jacket over a navy roll-neck, charcoal trousers and suede boots, with a khaki raincoat for the weather. Nobody on that production would have called it a capsule wardrobe. A costume department dressed a policeman for an ordinary cool day by the sea, and almost sixty years later men are still combing second-hand listings for a brown jacket like his.

I keep coming back to how little the outfit is trying to do. Nothing in it is new. Nothing in it carries a name. Every piece had existed in some form for a century or more, and every one began as equipment, made to keep somebody dry, warm or hidden. The elegance came afterwards, as a by-product, and it stayed because the weather never went away.

That is the subject of this piece. Autumn is the season that shows what a man's clothes are really made of, and a handful of garments have been passing the test for far longer than anyone has been writing about style. What follows is an anatomy of five of them: where each came from, which decade made it what it is, what to look for when you buy one, and what it says without saying anything. At the end there is a plain account of how they work together, and of what they cost.

Why autumn is the hard season

Summer is easy to dress for, because summer does half the work. A linen shirt and a bit of sun will carry almost anyone through lunch. Autumn asks for layers, and layers expose everything: the fit of a shoulder, the weight of a cloth, whether the colours were chosen or merely collected. There is more fabric on the body, so there is more to get wrong.

It is also the season the old northern cloths were made for. Wool, tweed, flannel and corduroy came out of damp, grey, changeable climates, and they look better in October light than anything made of cotton jersey ever will. They are matte, they have a grain or a pile, and they take a low sun in rather than throwing it back. A man in them on a wet pavement looks as if he belongs to the weather instead of arguing with it.

A capsule wardrobe is only a fashionable name for a very old habit: owning few things, and owning things that go together. The five below are the structure. Around them goes a plain base of an Oxford shirt in white and pale blue, a few good T-shirts, dark jeans with no fading and no rips, and a leather belt. The base is meant to be dull. It exists so that the five can do the talking.

1. The tweed jacket, a cloth designed to disappear

The most admired cloth in the wardrobe was invented so that nobody could see you in it.

Tweed as we know it comes from the Scottish estates of the nineteenth century, where stalkers and gillies had to crawl up open hillsides after deer, and the landowners who dressed them took the problem seriously. One laird, at Strathconon, is said to have sent his men up the slope in different cloths and watched them through a spyglass to see which one vanished best. What came out of experiments like this were the estate tweeds, or district checks, each with a pattern of its own. Glenfeshie was a shepherd's check with a red thread laid over it. Glen Urquhart, a tight interlock of houndstooth and sawtooth, was taken up by the Countess of Seafield for her estates, and the glen check survives in tailors' pattern books to this day. Prince Albert had a tweed woven for the stalkers and gillies at Balmoral, in blues and whites touched with crimson, tuned to look like the Cairngorms.

So the first tweed jackets were uniforms, and the uniform was camouflage. The Victorian gentlemen who borrowed the cloth for their shooting weekends were borrowing something more specific than warmth. They were borrowing the look of a man who knows the land and has a reason to be on it.

The genuine article now is Harris Tweed, which is unusual among fabrics in having an Act of Parliament of its own. The Harris Tweed Act of 1993 says the cloth must be handwoven by islanders in their own homes in the Outer Hebrides, from pure virgin wool dyed and spun there. Every fifty metres is inspected before it receives the Orb mark, a trademark that dates from 1910. If you find an old jacket with the Orb label sewn inside, you are holding something that was made, in the strictest sense, by hand, in somebody's house, on an island.

Each decade handed the jacket a new character. In the sixties it was McQueen's, casual and slightly dangerous. By the seventies it had become the uniform of the schoolmaster and the professor, which is class of another sort, one that has nothing to do with land and everything to do with books. Then came The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook in 1982, by Ann Barr and Peter York, which described London's well-bred young, who dressed like country people in town. In that world a tweed jacket that looked as if it had belonged to somebody else first was the highest form of the look. A brand-new one had not yet earned its place.

When you buy one, look at the cloth before anything else. A good tweed is dyed in the wool, before it is spun, so the colours are mixed into the yarn. Lean close and what looked like plain brown turns out to contain rust, moss and grey, and that depth cannot be printed on. Then look at the shoulder, which should be soft and follow your own, and at the weight, which should be enough to hang without hanging like a bell. Brown, olive, heather and the black-and-white of a glen check are the safest colours. They are the colours of a hillside, and on a man in a city they suggest somewhere else, which is much of the charm.

What the jacket says is that you understand the difference between formal and serious. It is not formal, and nobody has ever mistaken it for casual either.

2. The roll-neck, or what to wear instead of a tie

From the late nineteenth century, fishermen, dockers, athletes, sailors and naval officers wore thick knitted collars that folded over at the neck. Polo players gave the garment its English name, and Royal Navy submariners were a familiar sight in a heavier version. In the 1920s Noël Coward made it briefly fashionable. By the 1950s it had moved to the Left Bank, where black ones were worn by philosophers and by students who wished to resemble them. Then the cinema took it up. Marcello Mastroianni and Yves Montand turned it into something wealthy young men wanted, and in 1968 McQueen put on a navy one under his tweed. It was reportedly cashmere, which is not quite what a police lieutenant could afford and is exactly what a costume designer would choose.

What it does is simple. A shirt and tie are two decisions, and a roll-neck is one. It frames the jaw, lengthens the neck and gives a jacket something soft to sit against, so that a man in a roll-neck under tweed looks dressed rather than merely not undressed. It also has a small social advantage, which is that nobody can say you forgot the tie. You wore something else instead.

Buy it in a fine gauge, in merino or, if you can run to it, cashmere. It should fit without being tight, with a collar that sits snug and rolls once. Navy first, then charcoal, then a soft cream or oatmeal. Black is the most severe colour and the hardest to carry in daylight, so leave it for the evening. Thick fisherman's knits are another garment altogether: a chunky one is a jumper, not a layer, and it will not go under anything. A mill in Derbyshire, John Smedley, has been knitting since 1784, which tells you how long people have known how to do this properly, and how little is left to improve.

3. Flannel and corduroy, the trousers nobody photographs

Most writing about clothes is about what goes on top. Trousers do the quiet work. They decide whether the whole thing hangs or sags, and in autumn the two cloths that do it best could hardly have more different histories.

The word flannel is probably Welsh, and for a long time it meant a coarse wool for working people. The soft grey suiting flannel we think of today is credited to a mill in Wellington, Somerset. Fox Brothers has been weaving there since 1772, and its slogan insists that if it isn't Fox, it isn't flannel. The secret is milling: after weaving, the cloth is beaten until the fibres fuse and the surface blurs, which is why flannel looks soft-focus and falls with such weight. The mill's own history lists Churchill and Cary Grant among its customers.

Grey flannel led a double life. In America it became shorthand for the organisation man, after Sloan Wilson's 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which is about a man worn thin by conformity. In Turin, Gianni Agnelli wore the same cloth by day, as we saw in The Watch Over the Cuff, and made it look like leisure. The cloth had not changed. The man had.

Corduroy has the opposite pedigree. Its ancestor is fustian, a heavy cloth named for Fustat, near Cairo, and the ridged version took shape in the English mills around Manchester in the eighteenth century. For the Victorian working man it was the uniform. Engels, writing about Manchester in the 1840s, noted that the workers were known as fustian jackets, in contrast to the gentlemen in broadcloth, and one historian of the Chartists has described wearing fustian as a way of declaring your class without a word. An unspoken code, in other words, nearly two centuries before this magazine.

Then it climbed. By the seventies cord had become the trouser of the schoolmaster, the architect, the painter and the man who edits things, in conker brown, mustard and bottle green. It is the only fabric I can think of that rose in status by being worn by clever people with no money.

Flannel should be mid or charcoal grey and heavy enough to hang rather than cling, with a high waist, pleats if you can carry them, and turn-ups of about four centimetres, which add weight at the hem and make the trouser fall straight. Cord should be a medium wale, since fine reads smarter and thick reads artistic, in brown, olive or bottle green, and in pure cotton. Avoid stretch in either. Stretch cord has baggy knees within the month.

If I could buy only one thing from this entire list, it would be the grey flannel trousers. Nobody looks at trousers, and everything else is easier to get away with when the legs are right.

4. The coat, a velvet collar and a trench

In Gogol's story The Overcoat, published in 1842, a poor clerk in St Petersburg saves for months to replace a coat that has worn to rags. The new one changes everything. Colleagues who had barely noticed him throw a party in its honour. It is a comic story with a hard centre, and it has not aged, because the coat is still the first thing the world sees you in, and the world makes up its mind quickly.

There are two classic answers. The first is the Chesterfield, named for the sixth Earl of Chesterfield, a leader of fashion in the 1830s, and popular from around 1840. It is slightly waisted, with a short vent at the back and, traditionally, a velvet collar. The velvet had a practical purpose: collars got dirty, and a velvet cover was cheaper to replace than the collar beneath it. The coat remained the smart overcoat for well over a century, and Roger Moore wore a navy one as Bond in Live and Let Die in 1973, which tells you how long the style kept its authority.

The second is the trench. Two London firms still argue over who invented it. Aquascutum dates from 1851, and Thomas Burberry developed gabardine, the tightly woven cotton that keeps rain out while letting a man breathe, in 1879. Burberry submitted a design for an officer's raincoat to the War Office in 1901, and by 1914 officers on the Western Front were buying them privately. That is why the coat has shoulder straps, for rank, and metal rings at the belt, for map cases and kit. When the war ended, it came home.

The sixties gave it two faces. Peter Sellers wore one for comic effect as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther in 1963. Four years later Jean-Pierre Melville dressed Alain Delon in a belted trench and a fedora in Le Samouraï and let him say almost nothing. Between them they cover the full range of what a coat can do to a man's reputation.

If you are buying a wool coat, ask whether it is canvassed, which means a layer of stiffening between the cloth and the lining that will shape itself to you over the years. Choose single-breasted, to the knee or just below, in navy, charcoal or camel, in wool with a little cashmere for softness if you can. For a trench, look for dense cotton gabardine, a proper storm flap and a belt that actually buckles. The length decides everything, because a coat that stops above the knee is only a long jacket.

If you live somewhere properly cold, buy the wool coat. If your autumns are mild and wet, buy the trench and wear it until it goes soft.

5. The Chelsea boot, a Queen's answer to a small problem

Joseph Sparkes Hall, a bootmaker from Devon working in London, patented an elastic-sided ankle boot in 1837. Fourteen years later he showed it at the Great Exhibition under a title as unwieldy as the boot was neat: Patent Elastic Articles for the Feet. He presented prototypes to Queen Victoria, and had the good sense to let it be known that she wore them. The usual explanation is that she rode, and laces tangle in stirrups.

The Queen's riding boot then did what the best things do. It went from the paddock to the pavement. In the early sixties it was on the King's Road in Chelsea, worn by mods, musicians and anyone who wanted to look sharp without looking as if he had tried, and Anello & Davide, a London theatrical bootmaker, made a Cuban-heeled version for the Beatles that became the Beatle boot. It is a good example of how class works backwards. A Queen's boot became the rebellion of the young, and then the quiet furniture of the sensible adult.

Its virtue is that it has no laces, so there is one clean line under the trouser, which lengthens the leg. It goes from tweed to denim without changing its mind, and I know of no other boot that does.

A good one is Goodyear welted. In 1869 Charles Goodyear Jr. built the machinery that stitches the upper to a strip of leather called the welt, with the sole stitched to the welt in turn, instead of glued on. The point is that the sole can be taken off and replaced again and again. Crockett & Jones started in Northampton in 1879 on exactly this machinery, and the 2012 Bond film Skyfall went to them for its footwear. A welted boot is less an expensive object than one that can be rebuilt, and a competent cobbler can replace the elastic sides, which are the first thing to go.

For a single pair I would choose dark brown, because it works with tweed, with grey flannel and with jeans. Black calf is the city boot and sits best under a charcoal coat. Suede is hardier than its reputation, though not in January slush, and a brush and a protective spray will do most of the work.

How the five fit together

There are three rules, and none of them is complicated. Let one piece be loud. In this wardrobe it is the tweed, and everything beneath it should be quiet. Keep the colours to a single landscape: moss, peat, heather, slate, navy, camel. None of them argue with each other. And prefer texture to colour, because a wardrobe of knit, flannel, suede and tweed has plenty of depth without a single bright thing in it.

On a working day, wear the grey flannel, a white Oxford shirt, the tweed jacket and the boots. If you work somewhere a suit would be too much and trainers too little, this is the answer. For a long lunch, wear the navy roll-neck, the tweed, cord trousers and brown suede boots, which is McQueen's outfit almost exactly and very hard to improve. For a weekend walk, an Oxford shirt open at the neck, dark jeans, the boots, and the coat on top. For dinner without a tie, a charcoal roll-neck, flannel trousers and the overcoat. A jacket over a roll-neck will satisfy most dining rooms, though the strictest of the grand hotels we visited in Hotel Savoir-Faire still expect a tie, and it is worth knowing before you go.

None of this needs thinking about in the morning. That is what the capsule is for.

Where the real thing is still made

Every one of these pieces still has a home. Tweed has the Outer Hebrides, where the weavers' sheds stand beside the houses on Lewis and Harris and the cloth is still woven under the Act. Flannel has the town of Wellington in Somerset, where Fox has been weaving since the eighteenth century. Knitwear has Lea Mills, near Matlock in Derbyshire, working since 1784 and still with a factory shop. Welted boots have Northampton, where Crockett & Jones has been stitching since 1879. None of them is a showroom. All of them are working places, and I find it pleasing that the clothes we associate with grand hotels and Alpine lunches came from damp northern towns where nobody was thinking about either.

What it costs, and where the class is cheap

Some of this is expensive. A new Harris Tweed jacket from a good maker, a coat with proper canvas and a pair of welted boots will cost real money, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But the distinction this magazine keeps returning to, between expensive and with class, is nowhere clearer than here, because three of the five pieces are better bought second-hand than new.

Tweed jackets and wool coats from the eighties and nineties were often cut from heavier cloth, with more care in the making, than much of what is sold now, and nobody is competing with you for them. Look inside for the Orb label and for a maker's label that says wool. A tailor will adjust the sleeves and the waist for a fraction of what a new jacket costs, and that small alteration is the difference between a jacket you have borrowed and one you own. Trousers can be found second-hand too, or made up from a mill's cloth. A roll-neck in good merino is cheaper than cashmere and, for most of us, wears just as well; avoid acrylic blends, which pill within a season.

Boots are the exception. Buy those new, and buy them welted, so that they can be rebuilt. If I had to say where to spend the money, it would be on the two things you cannot fix later: the shoulders of the coat and the construction of the boots. Everything else can be found, mended or altered.

And a word about what not to buy. Anything sold as tweed-effect that is mostly polyester will not do the work of wool, and anything with a logo defeats the point. As we said in The Code of Discretion, none of these pieces carries one, and that is no accident.

What the five have in common

Look back over them and you find the same story five times. A garment made for a job: hiding from deer, keeping out the damp of a trench, staying warm on a boat, not tangling a lace in a stirrup, standing up to a Manchester winter. The elegance was a by-product. It lasted because the job never expired. It still rains, it still gets cold, and a man still needs to look presentable on the way from one to the other.

That is why these clothes have outlasted every trend, and why they are open to almost anyone. The principle is old and ordinary: dress for the weather you actually have, in cloth that suits it, and buy things that can be mended. None of it requires money. Some of it requires patience, in the second-hand shop, at the tailor's, with the cobbler who will resole the boots in five years.

McQueen was not dressed for the chase. He was dressed for an ordinary day, in clothes that had been solving ordinary problems for a century, and when the day turned out to have a chase in it, nothing needed changing. I cannot think of a better definition of being well dressed.

If you enjoyed this, Vedlen arrives every week: one quiet look at what living with class meant, where it can still be found, and how to bring a little of it into an ordinary Thursday.