Gardening wear for the stylish man
Designers are at last creating covetable clothing that you can wear on an allotment and beyond
The spring/summer 2023 men’s fashion show for Dior, staged by the designer Kim Jones, was, he said, an attempt to link the garden of Christian Dior’s childhood home in Granville, France, with that of the Bloomsbury Group’s Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell at Charleston in East Sussex. Jones is a self-confessed Bloomsbury fan and his catwalk, with its blooms and pastel-coloured country house, was a strange Anglo-French horticultural dreamscape. Even the Stephen Jones-designed hats were based on the one worn by Duncan Grant when painting and featured Dior’s Cannage motif, referencing the trellis of the pergola Christian Dior installed in the garden at Granville.
Fashion designers have long been inspired by gardens. Silvia Venturini Fendi grows fruit and veg as well as roses, and a few years ago staged a show in a garden in Milan where models wore overalls and carried watering cans. Gianni Versace hired Sir Roy Strong, former director of the V&A, to create gardens for him at Villa Fontanelle, his property at Lake Como. And, of course, Yves Saint Laurent purchased the painter Jacques Majorelle’s tropical garden in Marrakesh, where his ashes were later scattered.
Even the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik is given to saying, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, look after your garden.” His passion for gardens, he explains, stems from his childhood spent on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands, and his shoes often incorporate floral and botanical themes. The designer still owns the family home in Spain, although these days he is mostly found at his place in Bath, where his garden is planted with all sorts of trees.
Given this history of fashion and flora, it comes as quite a surprise to realise there has never really been a fashionable collection of gardening clothes. And it is perhaps just as surprising that British brands have not risen to the challenge. As David Gold of the Royal Mail said recently on the launch of the first stamps with the new King’s silhouette, which feature the nation’s favourite flowers: “Britain is a nation of gardeners, and a love of flowers runs deep in our collective consciousness.”
But it looks as though that is about to change. Could there be a new gardencore movement on the horizon? The fashion for chore jackets has seen the type of workwear a gardener might well adopt grace the streets of the capitals of the world. And Gareth Scourfield, formerly fashion editor at British Esquire and a man who has styled such well-dressed stars as Daniel Craig, Richard Madden and Colin Firth, is developing a range of gardening outfits for those who want to look good while they are actually doing the weeding.
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“During the first lockdown we had quite gorgeous weather and I reconnected with my own garden, as I think a lot of people did,” Scourfield says. “I was wearing jeans and track pants and T-shirts to do the work, and none of it was really suitable. So I started to buy some utilitarian pieces from eBay and vintage sites and also became fascinated by what artists wore in their gardens — people like Monet, who liked a smock, Picasso, who looked great in a Breton-striped top, and Derek Jarman, who preferred a very practical terracotta boiler suit.”
Scourfeld came up with the idea for Scour & Field (his name, he says, is derived from the Old English word skali-feld, meaning “dweller in the field”), a collection of sustainably produced gardeningwear that you can also keep on to go to the pub once you replace your secateurs with your phone in one of the many deep, functional pockets he is introducing to his jackets and trousers. Scour & Field won’t be available until later in the year, but in the meantime he advises you look at Oliver Spencer’s new gardening-inspired collection.
“I actually wear a pair of Oliver Spencer heavy linen Judo trousers to garden in. They’re perfect — roomy with a slight tapered leg that sits at the top of your boots. But he’s actually done a dedicated gardening collection too.”
Indeed, the London-based designer is releasing his second collaboration with Niwaki, makers of elegantly designed gardening tools. After the success of his first partnership with the Anglo-Japanese firm last year, Spencer has revisited the idea and expanded his offering. “We started selling Niwaki tools a couple of years ago, and it struck me that there are no great gardening clothes,” explains Spencer, who has his own garden on the Isle of Wight. “Most of us just throw on old stuff like jeans and T-shirts, but these are not really fit for purpose. So I teamed up with Niwaki with the aim of creating a functional gardening collection that is utilitarian and workwear inspired.”
Mostly made from organic cotton, Spencer’s designs can handle anything the garden throws at them but also look fashionable in other contexts. “For this second collaboration we’ve honed the silhouettes and made the garments even more functional by adding new ergonomic pocket details. And, importantly, even if you’re not at all green fingered, these jackets and shirts are still beautifully designed workwear additions to a modern man’s wardrobe.”
Here you will find smock shirts in denim, gilets, overshirts — and the hero piece, the Hortus gardening jacket, which comes in several different hardwearing organic materials including recycled-cotton, indigo-rinsed denim and a tough ripstop. Its five pockets at the front are there to hold tools and seed cartons while side pockets at the rear provide more storage space.
“I wanted the jacket to have what I call an ‘artist’ silhouette: boxy, so that it’s comfortable when you’re moving around or crouching down, but also up to date,” explains Spencer of the Hortus. “We added some new details too, like sturdy elastic on the right-hand pocket at the front to secure your gardening tools more effectively.”
The collection also features some rugged shirts like the Ohana smock shirt, a collarless style with oversized patch pockets, which is inspired by a traditional Japanese gardening shirt, and the Haru overshirt, which has a semi-hidden placket to prevent the buttons snagging on stray twigs and branches. The Haru comes in soft but heavy-duty ecological cotton, linen and hemp fabrics and, like the other pieces in the collection, will also serve as a useful piece of contemporary workwear when you have a pint, rather than a trowel, in hand.
oliverspencer.co.uk/niwaki
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