NIGEL CABOURN
Nigel Cabourn started his label in Newcastle in the seventies and designed menswear from a vintage archive he collected himself. Every collection began with a real garment: a thirties mountaineering jacket, a naval smock, a wartime parka, rebuilt in heavy cloth and sold above the high street and below the runway. Around four thousand pieces sit in the studio alongside the reference library he worked from. Converse, Belstaff, Fred Perry, Filson and Maison Mihara Yasuhiro have all put their name next to his.
Nigel’s influences: Vietnam, Everest, Antarctica And Music
Nigel was keen to make a short fashion film about his life, influences and career in fashion. We had no agenda. We just wanted him to talk about his life. He had a lot to say and it was good to listen to.
The studio is the old drill hall in Jesmond, Newcastle: green-painted roof trusses, a bare worn wooden floor, high windows, very school hall vibes. Racks of vintage flight jackets, oilskins and military greens run down one side. There’s a green-painted fireplace with an orange lifebuoy sitting in it, framed polar and mountaineering prints on the walls, and a Nigel Cabourn-branded ping-pong table with sample sneakers bagged on top of it.
We kept the team small to protect the film’s intimacy: just one director and one DOP. Mark Bage directed and produced; Thom Hobbs shot it.
It took a couple of hours. He warmed up, showed us round, introduced us to his staff, and showed us the archive and his design process. He was in a worn Levi’s denim jacket with an LA 1984 athletics badge on it, a navy watch cap, indigo selvedge turned up at the hem, and a whistle on a beaded lanyard round his neck. Then we set up in his office, the pine-clad one with the green desk, and interviewed him for about an hour. We had a cup of tea and left.
Nigel was always very frank and liked to swear.
We left it in.
Nigel Cabourn Life Influences interview
"If you've got that all mixed together, you're going to be a f***ing good designer, aren't you?"
Nigel Cabourn
He describes himself as a big giant sieve of history: everything going in and the clothes coming out the other side. A postmaster father in Scunthorpe and no fashion anywhere in the family. A friend who came back from fashion college in 1965 and told him there were two hundred girls there and one bloke, so that was the career decided. His grandfather in the trenches and his father in Burma, and both of them told him everything. Paul Smith walking onto his stand in 1973 and getting him into Browns and Jones. Twenty years of showing in Paris twice a year. The Japanese buyers who started arriving at the end of the seventies. Vietnam bellows pockets put onto oilskin jackets in 1979. Lev Yashin in all black with a number one on the back, which he says had him thinking about clothes at eight years old.
We cut the hour down to thirteen minutes and delivered that along with cutdowns, snippets and social versions.
We also did a beautiful lo-fi analogue stills shoot with Nigel on a Leica CM. We didn’t shoot any product or archive pieces. This was purely about the man, his character, his history, a mini archive of his life in fashion.
The film was made for Nigel’s own use in conjunction with Sneak in Peace, so it primarily featured on SneakTV.
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