Tweed Will Rock You

I was probably 12 when I got my only tweed jacket. It was purchased at Gowdy's on the Woodstock Road in Belfast, in the days when you were expected to dress like a small facsimile of your father. And I did hate that jacket. It was hot, unforgiving and scratchy and there were flecks of purple on it that looked like alien life forms.

My tweed aversion has survived all those years. Sometimes I think that when I decide to go mature, that a jacket in sturdy herringbone might give me a bit of gravitas. It works for Seamus Heaney and those other professorial sorts. But not yet, surely.

I was walking around Bang, the vintage clothing store on Ann Street the other day. And I couldn't help but touch the sleeves of the jackets on the tweed rack. Suddenly, Mike the proprietor appeared at my arm. It was like when Mr Benn, the animated character from Festive Road encounters the fez-wearing shopkeeper. Mike gave me a conspiratorial wink.

"Can't get enough of them, Stuart. They're flying out of the shop."

With the persuasive powers of his station, Mike rolled a jacket off a hangar and slipped it over my shoulders. Harris Tweed. A crofter on some windy Scottish shore probably spent half his life creating the cloth. Nice. Unfortunately a little tight in places.

"That's the way they're wearing them these days," he offers.

Perhaps, but only if you are a slight-shouldered hipster, with 5% body fat, narrow Chinos and a mousey growth under the chin. This particular jacket hugs the middle and pinches the upper arms. I start to itch and feel hot. I am 12 years old again. I mumble an excuse and exit, swiftly.

Tweed is of course de rigeur again, a staple in the high street stores with expensive variations in the designer racks who make an easy connection to their Gatsby chic. Let's also remember that a Ralph Lauren got a credit on the Annie Hall movie in 1977, where wovens ruled and a classic look was revived. And to think that my Gowdy's jacket was just a few years before this. Always the trend-setter, so I was.