The cult of the gilet

Last summer I attended a reunion at my prep school. The occasion was the leaving of a much-loved master. I thought that the appropriate thing to wear would be a tweed jacket in honour of prep-school masters everywhere. I found myself woefully overdressed. Pretty much all of my contemporaries were wearing gilets. It was a similar story this year at the Fortnum & Mason awards, the Oscars of the British food and drink scene. I wore a suit, but it seemed as if every other guest was casually sporting a gilet.

When I was growing up the only people who wore gilets were fishermen, farmers and Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. Furthermore, they weren’t called gilets, they were called body warmers or sleeveless coats. Gilet is a French word, though it has very different connotations there thanks to the antics of les gilets jaunes.

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