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.

The gilet has completely taken over the wine world. The modern wine man no longer goes for a tweed jacket and red trousers. He wears jeans, a gilet, preferably emblazoned with the name of a producer, and brown leather boots for tramping around vineyards. I think part of the reason why English wine producers, especially ex-City boys, love a gilet so much is that it suggests the wearer is more involved with the agricultural side of the business than he really is. A gilet says that the wearer is equally at home in the boardroom and the fields. It’s the same affectation as driving a Range Rover in Kensington.

Perhaps the apotheosis of this style is Charlie Ireland, the adviser from Clarkson’s Farm. Whether he’s in the office or out in the fields discussing crop yield, he is rarely without a green sleeveless fleece with smart leather piping.