I’m still on holiday, officially, but I am always on the look out for ways to increase the scope of Tweed Therapy. Yesterday saw a particularly successful and pleasurable tweed hunt in the shadow of Trinity College Dublin, all thanks to Kevin & Howlin of Nassau Street.
Kevin & Howlin is a special place for all sorts of reasons, but, particularly significant from my point of view, is that it was Dr Macnab’s first tweed shop. The tweeds displayed in K&H had a powerful and mysterious allure to the young Dr M in his student days. They had a profound effect on both his sartorial and psychological development, and set him firmly on the road to becoming the man he is today (that being a man who owns more pairs of tweed breeks than his wife owns handbags).
Once, Dr M tells me, he had his pocket picked and credit card stolen while swotting hard in Trinity’s Berkley library. Such was the pulling power of K&H’s tweed that even the thief found it impossible to resist and his first (and only) purchase with his ill-gotten plastic was a three-piece suit of the finest Donegal tweed. As a dutiful wife, I am honour bound to believe this story, hook, line and sinker, so I do.
Thankfully, Kevin & Howlin seems to have changed little since those days: the walls are lined with stack upon stack of tweed caps and rack upon rack of jackets, skirts and trousers skulk somewhere in the middle and, of you manage to make it to the back of the shop, you will find bolts of pure, unadulterated tweed just crying out to be taken home.
It’s a very traditional shop, both in terms of cloth, and also cut: Really Wild it isn’t, but charming it is and you will struggle to find finer examples of timeless tweed clothes. The tweeds from which these classic clothes are made, however, are ever changing: all are woven at the Magee mill in Donegal and many of the tweeds are from small loom-runs, and therefore fiendishly limited in quantity.
It almost goes without saying that it was a rare and fabulous treat to be able to select tweed off the roll in person. The fact that it was Donegal tweed made it even better. Donegal doesn’t get as higher profile as Harris amongst the “Tweederati”, but it’s no less beautiful, not to mention practical. I have a decent yardage of the wonderful stuff folded into my suitcase to play with once I get home and will certainly be ordering more from K&H to kick start the Jane Macnab AW2012 collection (to be extremely pretensions about it!).
Long live Donegal!
mrsmacnab 