John Alexander Skelton’s latest look book begins and ends with pictures in which you can make out the clothes, but only just: A pair of wanderers are seen walking down a muddy gravel pathway, the silhouettes of their fitted jackets and billowing trousers (and one jaunty hat) standing in contrast to the murky green of rolling hills in the Peak District. In the final image, we see the same duo wandering back along the same path slowly enveloped by mist.
It was a suitably cinematic framing device for the collection, which took its cues from the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, an early 20th-century walking club in the north of England that Skelton was drawn to as much for their passionate belief in the restorative properties of the great outdoors as he was for their socialist politics. (The group was instrumental in the establishment of Britain’s freedom to roam laws, allowing public access to private countryside land for recreational purposes, after participating in the mass trespass of Kinder Scout—the exact spot where Skelton’s look book was shot—back in 1932.) More specifically, Skelton honed in on a figure called Bert Ward, a Labour Party politician and activist who created illustrated guidebooks for walkers. “When he would take people rambling, he would want to educate them on the local history, or the local geology, or the local folklore,” Skelton explained. “He made it into a cultural pursuit as well as a physical one.”
Of course, as a designer, Skelton was equally fascinated by the elegant outfits worn by many of the ramblers back in the day: Before the development of proper walking gear, most would take their strolls in tailoring and boots. “I was thinking about ramblers today, and the clothes are so awful it’s sort of depressing—all this neon and so much gear that’s unnecessary for what they’re doing,” he added. “I started thinking about what I would want to wear as a rambler, and that was really the basis for the collection.”
Skelton’s skill as a designer lies in his ability to spin a yarn—in both senses of the term. With the brilliant (and somewhat unexpected) origin for the collection lying in sportswear, he explored a handful of new techniques that married the old-world spirit of his clothes with a romantic sense of the outdoors. Most striking were the beautiful waxed jackets in scorched earth yellows and reds, their wonky proportions prettified with a historic technique of applying beeswax to the cotton (more sustainable than paraffin wax, and more beautiful too, with its textural craquelure effect). Shirts and tunics cut from breezy Japanese linens could be worn to climb any mountain in style, and they came stamped and embroidered with pilgrim patches sourced from the digital archives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art—many of them from centuries of worshippers traveling to Canterbury to pay their respects at the shrine of Thomas Becket—or featured those motifs on brooches created by Skelton’s regulator, the jeweler Slim Barrett.
From this maelstrom of cultural references (the medieval, the religious, the Gothic) and sartorial references (tailoring, historic sportswear, forgotten corners of British craftsmanship), Skelton whizzed up something strangely chic and utterly desirable. It would be enough to make you want to put on your walking boots and hit the great outdoors immediately—even if your destination is a gloomy English morning on Kinder Scout.
