'We’ve just launched our very own Tweed,’ says Niels van Rooyen, the jocular and ruddy creative director of Holland and Holland. ‘It was in the archive from 1830 and we’ve dusted it off and had it woven again by factories right here in the UK,’ he says beaming like a prowling Cheshire cat. He’s pointing at a subdued beige and brown fine tweed, a little like a puppy tooth check with a subtle line of purple thread of window pane check running across it.
Van Rooyen is talking me through the men’s winter collection, the core Holland and Holland kit (70% of its customers are men). This is essentially tough, practical and classic all weather gear for the shooting set. These sports are the brand’s DNA but for a while a few years ago H&H re-pitched itself as a luxury lifestyle brand, a kind of English Hermes but with hunting rifles instead of saddlery at it’s core. It was always an uneasy fit.
This move alienated the regular country set who had always bought their shooting gear from H&H, and it didn’t drive the sales to justify the changes. Van Rooyen left the brand during this difficult time, returning in glory three years later once this flirtation with fashion and luxury had faded from the house like an expensive exotic odor.
Yet, Van Rooyen isn’t one to miss the opportunity of pushing his product towards the young or newly rich who are making their first strides towards country pursuits. ‘I’m amazed by the popularity of trousers, ‘ he says with just the faintest twang of his South African roots and sounding ever-so slightly bonkers. ‘I think it’s the younger Royals, they’re less inclined to wear the cropped trousers and shooting socks that the Prince of Wales prefers.’ In Holland and Holland’s world, this is obviously a seismic shift of taste, decorum and etiquette.
In this collection there’s a navy blazer with silvered gun cartridge buttons in a crease-resistant super 150 wool that would perfectly suit a formal dinner after a shoot. This is about as ‘fashion’ as the collection gets. And the necessary direction the brand has moved, explains Van Rooyen, seeing Holland and Holland as exclusively a shooting lifestyle company which produces ties, cashmere shirts, knitwear and their famous shooting socks (‘knitted with four needles by about 75 women in the north of England’) in an assortment of candy bright colours.
Loden, twill, corduroy, recoil pads (in leather to protect your shoulders from the gun’s kick back), shooting vests and tweed make up the lexicon of Holland and Holland’s unique offering. It’s a world of stiff upper lips, stout boots and making no fuss over driving rain, freezing fog or not getting a full brace of grouse on your first day’s shoot. It’s the world of the English upper classes at their most thrusting, sturdy and vaguely absurd. The hide bound world of Jeeves and Wooster, nanny and croquet feels only a paneled morning room away.
Which is all, of course, reassuring. The world may be going to the dogs, but the good folk at Holland and Holland are still making their ingenious ‘Fitwell’ shooting jackets – the distinctive double pleat over each shoulder which enables just enough give to raise your double bore shotgun to your shoulder. Which does make one feely a teensy bit sorry for the poor little grouse.
