Country Life’s new style advice? Mind the mud

In the latest issue of Country Life there are some sartorial tips for gentlemen of a certain age who want to look appropriate but appealing in the way that they dress; “somewhere between bereavement and bingo” is how the magazine amusingly puts it. The story is incongruously illustrated by a large picture of Mick Jagger in a red silk shirt and multi-hued sequin bomber jacket. You wouldn’t manage to get the cows to come home in that outfit. You may not even get your wife to come home wearing it.

Mick Jagger on stage with the Rolling Stones in May 2024

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However, Country Life proceeds to advise its country-loving middle-aged male readers on how a few fashionable flourishes can ensure that they maintain a certain joie de vivre in their wardrobes this winter. Some of the suggestions are eminently sensible: for example, chore jackets (as popularised by Monty Don) certainly make a welcome change from a traditional blazer. As we get older we get more forgetful and the multiple pockets a chore jacket offers are a safe haven for the extra detritus we carry: spectacles, paper tissues, fall alarms and Werther’s toffees.

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David Hockney

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A spot of colour is also recommended to brighten your outlook. Think of David Hockney, 87, and his splashes of red, green and cobalt blue, or the architect Richard Rogers who, until his death aged 88, wore an array of rich jewel-coloured Nehru-collared shirts. These men show how a primary can look good even when you’re technically past your prime. The other advantage of brightly coloured clothes, I can attest, is that they’re easier to find in the morning without having to reach for your spectacles.

But it is after this point that Country Life may challenge its more rural readers. Some of the advice proffered would lead to a few puzzled stares at the local pub where I live up north in Cumbria. Red trousers are still recommended by the magazine — I’ve thankfully not seen a single pair since moving up here. Corduroys are predictably on the list too. They look fine but have you tried removing splatters of mud or mashed potato from the ridges (called wales) you get in corduroy?

But most alarming of all is Country Life’s suggestion that we all invest in some scarfage, particularly a kikoy. For those who don’t know, scarfage is not a fertiliser but the wearing of scarves. And a kikoy is — I don’t recall spotting one on Countryfile, or even Clarkson’s Farm — a colourful Kenyan shawl. The magazine recommends you drape your kikoy under your coat, “sans knot, leaving the ragged, tasselled ends to poke out like a flapper skirt”.

I’m sure a kikoy can look very dashing. And I’m all for some agreeable eccentricity in the way men look as we get older — why should we have to dress the same colour as the weather most of the year? But a kikoy just sounds utterly impractical. Scarves will get caught up on barbed wire, attacked by tups and ridiculed in your local.

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The truth is, due almost entirely to practical reasons rather than aesthetic ones, most of us rural-dwellers dress more like Jeremy Clarkson than Jeremy Hackett. Country Life has cited Stanley Tucci as an inspiration. The nattily attired actor lives in Barnes, in southwest London, and once went to Goodwood. Stately homes don’t really count as the countryside. They’ve also taken advice from Peter York, co-author of The Sloane Ranger Handbook, who lives on a garden square in London. And they’ve spoken to the interior designer Nicky Haslam. Now, Nicky has perfected the art of elegant eccentricity, but he lives in a pavilion in a dainty village in the Cotswolds. The Cotswolds isn’t really the countryside; it’s just a giant parterre.

When I left London for the Lake District five years ago it soon became clear that most of my city clothes had become redundant. Alpaca wool coats get soggy in the rain, cashmere sweaters snag on hawthorn bushes, suede shoes ruin before you reach the car and turn-ups on trousers act as refuse collectors: you have to empty out the rubbish they’ve amassed at the end of each outing. It’s more fell and scar than scarfage up here. I’m really not sure what they’d make of a multi-hued, tassel-edged kikoy in Keswick.