‘I can’t imagine wearing anything else’: Goodbye to Old Town, the beloved Norfolk clothing company
The premise of Old Town clothing was a simple one: choose from a limited range of designs and fabrics (cotton drill, canvas, linen or cord), provide your measurements and, a few weeks later, a box would arrive through the post containing your trousers, jacket or skirt, handmade in Norfolk by designer Will Brown, Marie Willey and their team of 10 seamstresses. But this year Old Town announced they are not taking any further orders and is winding down the main business – news greeted with anguish among their regular clients, including myself.
“We’re 68, we are tired,” Willey says. “We made a rod for our own backs because we’ve micromanaged things to the point it’s worn us out.” Each had clearly defined roles – Willey dealing with customers and ordering fabric, Brown the designing and making. In fact, he was the only person who knew how to operate the buttonhole sewing machine so he did them all himself, for years.
Old Town began many thousands of buttonholes ago, in 1992, as a Norwich-based shop selling household wares – vintage enamel items, Welsh blankets and “expensive string”. A few years after they opened, Brown (who started cutting cloth in the late 1970s when he was part of the New Romantic Blitz club scene), made the first Old Town jackets.
Perhaps reacting to what Willey describes as their “Spartan simplicity”, a passerby once called them “prison clothes” – a low point in a period she says was “absolutely dismal – what we were trying to sell fell on stony ground.” In 2000, they retreated to the small Norfolk market town of Holt, started selling online, and quickly gained a reputation for their durable and simple clothes.
Old Town took inspiration from pieces Brown had designed in the late 1970s and early 1980s for clients including David Bowie, along with traditional clothing and workwear. This influence has been everywhere in recent years, from the cod-Bloomsbury Group aesthetics of Toast to fabric sellers Merchant and Mills encouraging the home tailor to DIY.
In menswear, the trend has seen the iron run out of steam with the drearily ubiquitous chore jacket. Old Town did all this first, and better, but with a modern edge. “There’s no particular time reference,” Brown says, “I was trying to achieve the desired effect with a minimum number of strokes and not much clutter.”
The company’s Unity jacket and trousers – loose, comfortable, with a draw-cord waist and the look of a boiler suit – is a case in point. While Old Town focused on menswear (there were just a few dress patterns available), the Unity combo has a relaxed and elegant simplicity that has made it a unisex hit – so contemporary, practical and hard-wearing that hip restaurant Brat use it for their staff uniforms. Rather than cosplaying the past, this is workwear that is still worn to be worked in: one of their first customers was Monty Don, who wears Old Town while toiling in the oomska of his garden.
These are clothes loved by their creators – Willey and Brown are rarely seen out of them– and this enthusiasm extended to their fans, who include historian Tom Holland, musician Billy Childish, writer Rebecca May Johnson, designer Giles Deacon and actors Toby Jones and Maxine Peake. Novelist Ben Myers, an Old Town regular, says that the personal touch was as important as the quality of his trousers: “I rang to order my first pair and ended up talking to Marie for an hour as she’s from my neck of the woods in the north-east. I don’t think we even discussed the trousers.”
It was all of this that made me fall in love with Old Town’s clothing a decade ago. Frustrated by the high street and yet another pair of shapeless, uncomfortable trousers that had fallen to bits in no time, I took the advice of writer and antique dealer John Andrews to make the pilgrimage to Holt. In the shop, racks of sample Old Town designs in their various fabrics hung along the walls. At our first meeting, I told Willey that I wore a 34” waist. She looked me up and down sternly, informed me that men always claim they’re two inches less than the truth, gave me a 34” and a 36”, and told me to try both. She was right. I ordered a pair of 36” olive green Stovepipe cords and have never looked back.
They arrived six weeks later and I wore them every day, autumn and winter, for years. I’m only now on my second pair and bought a third in khaki cotton drill, a fourth in black cord. Old Town made my wedding suit (navy linen Vauxhall trousers, Stanley jacket, waistcoat) at a fraction of the price it would have been anywhere else. When I took it to a traditional City of London tailor to get the trousers taken up, the boss was amazed at the quality of the stitching, cloth, and how little I’d paid for it – and admired the topstitching on the seams. Whereas most high street brands use overlocking, the quick and therefore cheap zigzag stitch, Brown preferred this sturdily functional and decorative traditional alternative.
Despite these expensive techniques, Old Town’s pricing has always been competitive. The final price of a pair of Stovepipe cords was £190. A far lighter wale cord at Folk is £140; the closest equivalent from Toast £175. Other brands are far more expensive – old-style cords will set you back a princely £535 at Margaret Howell. “We’ve probably under-priced but we’re happy with the mark-up,” says Willey, “I’d never want to do things that I couldn’t afford myself.”
Even a suit becomes better value in price per wear if it’s adaptable. It’s informal enough to wear out and about, and in hot weather I can pair the trousers over a white tee or linen shirt. It’s tough as anything, too – I didn’t even need to have it dry cleaned after our wedding, despite the party ending with a four-hour rave that kicked up so much dust we lost the deposit on the filthy PA.
Willey might have been strict over my waistline, but she and Brown created a brand that generously offered a helping hand to the fashion novice. Male customers have said that wearing Old Town gave them a newfound confidence. This feeling of an intimate connection with the clothes is the core of the reaction to the recent news. As well as the inevitable outpouring on social media, customers have offered to buy the business to keep it going, and there have been emails that are “almost poetic and quite heavy-duty”, a response that has left Brown and Willey “shell-shocked” and reduced to tears.
Where do we lost souls go now? While there are plenty of traditional and workwear inspired labels out there, only a few – including Hebden Bridge’s HebTroCo, London’s Blackhorse Lane Ateliers, Kent micro-brand AWMS or, farther afield, Sweden’s French militaria-inspired Casatlantic – stand out from the crowd. Other similar operations, Willey feels, take an easy route that doesn’t offer value. “They buy an old garment, take it apart, give it to a pattern cutter, give the pattern to a factory to make it,” she says, “they’re not designing it, they’re not making it, they’re not involved in the process, and at the end of the day it shows.”
There is a grain of comfort for the Old Town faithful. Labour And Wait, a retailer specialising in traditional household goods, will continue to sell the Unity trouser and jacket, with a view to finding a factory to produce them under licence. Brown will continue making their own clothes. “I cannot imagine wearing anything else,” Willey says; “wherever we are, Will will always have a sewing machine”.
