New & Lingwood
AS JERMYN STREET outfitters go, New & Lingwood is the wild card in an otherwise well-ordered pack, the wolf in a fold of calm and conservative sheep. What’s so surprising is that, for all its apparent ‘outsider’ status, it is, at heart, as authentically ‘English’ as any of its competitors.
George ‘Beau’ Brummell, whose statue stands right outside New & Lingwood’s door, would doubtless be aghast to see his doctrine of subdued good taste so comprehensively disregarded within. Inasmuch as there is one, the house style is a throwback to the days of the 18th-century macaronis in all their provocative gorgeousness. Then, leap-frogging Victorian sobriety completely, it channels the spirit of the dandies and decadents of the fin-de-siècle: Wilde, Firbank, Swinburne and Saki. Here, one is encouraged to nail one’s colours to the mast. And what colours. Across socks and pocket squares, trousers and raincoats, they run rainbow riot, proving as irresistible to government ministers and army officers as to musicians, actors and artists. I’m told that orange and pink are the bestselling hues, frequently combined in the form of one of New & Lingwood’s silk dressing gowns of surpassing splendour.
Mashing up the traditional and the anarchic, the classic and the outrageously contemporary, this most self-confident of outfitters brings out the inner toff in every Bohemian and the inner punk in every pillar of the Establishment.
See also: Oliver Brown, Cordings, Turnbull & Asser
