“I’m like a big giant sieve of history and I just turn it into the clothes,” said Nigel Cabourn of the inspiration for his decades of quietly influential designs for men’s clothes. To Cabourn, who has died aged 76, history meant war – his grandfather’s memories of trenches in the first world war, his father’s stories of Burma in the second, even his own awareness of the US M65 field jacket and other uniform novelties of the Vietnam war, as paired with jeans by students and protesters post-1968.
He was passionate about mountaineering and exploring too, especially Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Everest, and the Antarctic expeditions of Shackleton and Scott. He was also a football fan, thrilled sartorially by the dark-clad figure of Lev Yashin in goal for the Soviet Union in the 1958 World Cup.
What he understood was that the details of clothes for such events were not decorative but purposeful – for example the pleated bellows pockets favoured on US jackets in Vietnam, which could expand to hold ammunition or a day’s rations. Cabourn loved bellows pockets, appreciating both their exciting martial origins and the satisfaction male civilians got from their usefulness. Sometimes he was teased about his “trainspotter chic”, especially parkas and anoraks adapted from south polar expeditions, but he was, and remained, far ahead of the longterm direction of fashion, which in the late 20th and early 21st centuries moved towards the romance of extreme practicality. This became a distinct apparel market, with blue-collar workwear added to military kit and expeditionary gear. The fashion world outright copied him from the 2010s, to the annoyance of longtime devotees of his style.
Cabourn’s entry to his 50-year-plus career had been bold, though more conventional. Aged 20 in 1969 and still studying fashion at Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design, he started a company called Cricket, producing very youthful menswear – soft zip-up jackets, wide loon pants – well enough made to attract Paul Smith, who stocked it in his Nottingham store in 1973 and helped the Cricket label gain entry to London shops.
Cabourn, who firmly stated he designed clothing, not fashion, began to exhibit at trade fairs from 1973, establishing a reputation for Cricket’s informal tailoring in quality cloth. In 1978, Smith gave Cabourn an old RAF jacket with a complex button placket, telling him, “Nige, you should make army jackets like this”, and thereby introduced him to buying vintage. He was hooked.
Over the rest of his life, Cabourn amassed an archive of 4,000 clothing items with practical origins, and 3,000 books on military, expeditionary and work wear; he spent up to four months a year searching the world for rare garments, from a first world war leather coat to a smock from Hillary’s 1958 polar expedition. The knowledge he accrued soon began to transform what he created – he reworked a 1950s USAF flight jacket into the SV4, a bright, zipped blouson manufactured in Newcastle and first worn by local football fans, which became an international sensation.
Cabourn had had Japanese buyers since the star-maker wholesaler Sam Segure had approached him at a Paris trade fair in 1979, eventually putting in an order for a then-astonishing quarter of a million pounds. When Cabourn’s label, now in his own name, nevertheless was declared bankrupt because of cashflow problems in 1984, the year of the SV4 success, he freelanced for other menswear firms in the UK to keep going. But Japanese customers supported his sensibility, especially ideas flowing from his vintage collecting, so he was soon able to launch a store in Japan (he now has 16 outlets there). Cabourn’s first London store, styled like his HQ, an old drill hall in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, opened in Covent Garden in 2014.
Cabourn’s loyalty to his native north-east never wavered – he had no desire to transfer to the London base of the UK fashion business. He was born just outside Scunthorpe, where both his parents, John and Edith, worked for the General Post Office; the family later moved to the new town of Peterlee in County Durham when his father became postmaster there.
Just 17 when he went to college in Newcastle, Cabourn joked that he took the fashion course because of its high ratio of female to male students, but the real appeal was mastering technical skills – he made the first Cricket-label jacket by hand from his mother’s curtains for lack of other material. Cabourn became a textile connoisseur of both traditional – Harris Tweed, Japanese selvedge denim, cashmere for featherweight warmth at high altitude – and technical fabrics, such as naturally waterproof Ventile cotton developed for downed RAF aircrew in the second world war.
After 1984, Cabourn advertised minimally and the business grew only as much as he wanted, currently at £10m annual turnover – from Japanese licences, his Authentic label, stocked internationally, his workwear brand Lybro, and Army Gym sportswear. He collaborated with more than 30 major companies, a favourite being Fred Perry, where the theme was tennis-champ Perry’s less well-known supremacy at ping pong, a sport Cabourn enjoyed along with boxing and climbing.
Cabourn became familiar online as an enthusiast, pictured layered in vintage finds and delivering his well-crafted updates about dungarees, and snapped on the hunt for obscure coveralls or among the gym equipment in what he called his “boys’ club” HQ. Women bought into his practicality too – all those capacious pockets; when he added a range just for them, he recruited the Franco-Japanese designer and fellow collector Emilie Casiez. Together they scavenged flea markets and researched in the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw and the Airborne Assault Museum in Cambridge.
Cabourn married Janet Bell in 1987; she was the firm’s PR. She and their children, Sophie, Ben and Lucy, survive him. Sophie works for the company; a few years ago, she bought online for £20 that first jacket her father sewed from curtains. It has now joined the vintage archive.