What happens when you inherit your uncle’s underclothes

Just as the English have inspired supreme artistry in male dress, symbolised by Savile Row and Beau Brummell, so they have also contributed a dissenting movement of genteel shabbiness or grand nonconformity. It is not dictated by lack of cash but by sup-erior indifference, meanness and what I call the Robinson Crusoe syndrome, a delight in creating do-it-yourself clothes. Men like, and women do not like, reading Crusoe for that reason. The propensity to take pleasure in wearing old and worn, second-hand and even inherited clothes is strongest in wartime but persists into peace.

The fictional archetype of this kind of gentleman is Sunny Farebrother in Anthony Powell’s Music of Time. He insists on wearing his worn and faded, much-repaired but originally well-cut service dress from the first world war, right through the second, where he rises to the rank of colonel and does battle with Widmerpool at Corps HQ. Sunny, though secretly affluent, makes a wartime virtue of natural stinginess, practising with delight stringent economies in his gear, and travelling with elaborate kit of pre-1914 vintage.