January18
NationalPost.com – 18th January, 2014
Sherlock Holmes is famous for his cape-like coat, but the true aficionados know Withnail’s wardrobe
By Nathalie Atkinson
Paul McGann as Marwood and Richard E. Grant as Withnail in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I
Modern sleuth Benedict Cumberbatch tears around London in double-breasted Irish tweed. In lieu of the historic Inverness style worn by the many incarnations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian detective before him, this updated outerwear has been his staple since the BBC’s Sherlock 2009 debut. It’s an off-the-rack “Millford” coat from Belstaff, customized with red buttonhole thread by the pilot’s costume designer.
Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes
Robert Viglasky/Hartswood Films for MASTERPIECE
Long and full, it regularly swirls mid-air and in slow motion, sometimes more superhero cape than coat, and has become a coveted signature item in the way that a goofy deerstalker never could. It is such a phenomenon that in the series’ self-referential third season premiere episode (on PBS Sunday, no spoilers we promise!) it’s the subject of a few tongue-in-cheek quips.
Watson and Holmes
Robert Viglasky/Hartswood Films for MASTERPIECE
As a costume item that is a character of its own, I always think of the dramatic, ankle-sweeping frock coat in Withnail & I. In Bruce Robinson’s 1987 black comedy about two actors who go on a country holiday in 1969, the coat is a long swashbuckling tweed and gallivants around the chilly countryside on its titular owner (played by actor Richard E. Grant, who is currently in a role as a similar dissolute in the third season of Girls). He is an elegant wastrel and eloquent drunkard, a razor-tongued throwback to fin-de-siècle decadence. Throughout, whether fishing with a shotgun or trying to keep warm, that coat is as much Withnail’s prop as it is a layer of tweed skin.
Withnail bench
Withnail & I’s costume designer is Emmy and BAFTA-winning costume designer Andrea Galer, who has also costumed a Rochester (Toby Stephens), a Sherlock (Rupert Everett), both Janes (Austen, Eyre), several Marples (including one featuring the future Sherlock, Cumberbatch) and episodes of David Suchet’s famously fastidious dresser Poirot.
Galer chatted by phone from the London studio where she produces her own fashion collections as well as costumes for film and television. Robinson, she recalls, “wanted someone whose background was aristocratic and whose family had a family pile in the country, therefore his life was deeply rooted in the sense of rejecting establishment and with clothes, which is very much a Sixties thing.”
“If I had dressed him the way Bruce imagined it,” based on the specific manner the director remembered a friend dressing, “it would have been Forties-style classic overcoat and brogues, like Paul Smith — and it wouldn’t have flowed and moved and done any of those things,” she adds. Instead, the coat resembles something grand and antique that Withnail might have found in the attic. When Grant was cast in the role, she further tailored the style around him, “because he had that great skinny figure and you could then make it do all the sorts of things an actor like Richard would do. It became part of him – he never took it off, it was his security blanket, it was everything.”
Withnail car
Galer designed and made Withnail’s Harris tweed coat herself (the last ragged original, one of three made for the film, was auctioned for charity in 2000) and incorporated historical details like cuffed sleeves and tails, and lined it in flamboyant blue striped Indian silk. The particular Harris tweed, she explains, was meant to conjure the fabric in coats worn by a specific club of the Scotch Guards, and to resemble a 19th century riding coat.
Sherlockians hunt down and have bidding wars for versions of the BBC sleuth’s Belstaff coat online; Withnailers have it easier: they can simply order one from Galer. She has been making faithful reproductions of her Withnail coat since the tenth anniversary of the cult classic (about a hundred of them to date), and the Harris tweed, ordered to her specifications in hundred-meter batches, comes from the isle of Lewis.
These days costume designers routinely collaborate with high street retailers on movie-inspired collections, but Galer is about as far away from that kind of mass-market merchandising as it gets. Instead, the impassioned slow fashion advocate has taken a pop culture moment and made it a gateway for fans of the cult classic to understand the more meaningful heritage work behind garments.
The reproductions connect film enthusiasts to the narrative of Withnail & I and to other period film collections she offers, like a jacket created for a Jane Eyre character or the silk evening dress from The Lady Vanishes. But in so doing, Galer is also reconnecting them with the disappearing narrative of handmade craft – something Galer further explores in her own series of short documentaries on Sri Lankan craftswomen. One garment at a time.
What is interesting about men ordering the coat, Galer says, “is that it’s actually got nothing to do with them looking like Withnail.” One of her most recent customers is Michael Couchman, who lives lives in Kingston, Ontario and is working on a PhD in the history of cannabis policy in the British Empire. “It’s something niche – but ‘increasingly relevant,’ as I put on all the grant applications,” he chuckles.
Couchman first saw Withnail & I, which came out the year he was born, two years ago. “It was one of these cases of life imitating art: I used to act, and I’ve done a lot of drugs and at the time I was living at my crazy uncle’s house, so there were a lot of parallels!” On a whim as he was passing through London last year, he decided to buy the coat and had fittings with Galer in Savile Row and at her studio, where a calico toile was made based on his initial measurements (normally they are exchanged via email). The finished garment arrived last fall and like Withnail’s, has kept him warm through the recent ice storm and deep freeze.
When I spoke with Galer, she had just posted a Withnail coat to another customer in Canada — to Sebringville, Ont. military judicial officer Sean Raleigh.
“There’s no explosions, no grand love story but my understanding is, if you like it you love it,” Raleigh, 46, says of the movie. “And if you don’t, you scratch your head and don’t get it at all.” He is in the former camp —and has the personalized WITHNAIL licence plate to back up that claim. His relationship with Withnail & I goes back to 1996, his third year of law school at Western. Raised on a diet of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers by his British parents, Raleigh had recorded it when it aired on TV one fateful Saturday night. “And … I wore the tape out watching this film.” He has since then “officially” watched it 99 times, though he guesses the figure is probably higher.
“It was completely out of character for me, if I can say that,” the lawyer recalls of placing the winning bid on another Galer creation at a charity auction (the waistcoat worn by Charles Dance’s Mr. Tulkinghorn in BBC’s Bleak House). “I don’t dress up as Dickensian characters for Halloween or anything like that.” He visited Galer’s website and they started a bit of a correspondence.
For Raleigh, owning a Withnail coat resonates on a few nostalgic levels, from the cold climate to the friendship at the heart of the film. “In my last year of law school my best friend and I were sharing a finished attic apartment in a Victorian house in downtown London,” he recalls. “We couldn’t afford to pay a lot for hydro and I remember the washroom windows covered in ice and reading by candlelight to save on hydro —being these impoverished students and yet somehow we found money to go to the pub and have a few pints of beer, naturally.”
The coat is still en route. “I plan on wearing it, not as my daily winter jacket but it’s not going to be in a display case like a hockey jersey either,” Raleigh says. “It’s not going to look like a costume, not like dressing up as Indiana Jones and walking down the street, where everybody staring at you,” he says. “I don’t splurge a lot on myself – I’m married with two young kids and we’ve got priorities,” he admits, “but I thought I would treat myself to something that will be a beautiful thing for a long time. The idea of something being handmade and hand-cut and developed to order, to fit only me.”
It’s unlikely any but the Withnail cognoscenti will recognize the pop culture provenance of Raleigh’s coat when he wears it. “In five years, only two people have understood what the license plate meant,” he says. “One came up to me and said the line, ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!’ – it’s like code, like Masons greeting each other.”
The REG Temple is the official website for actor, author and director Richard E. Grant.
