DiM- your comments made me smile. I love well-worn clothing be they field jackets or tweeds or shirts.
Worn collars and cuffs drive some people nuts and I use them as a barometer to judge people (well, almost)
Of course in order to work, the stuff had to be good to start with.
My son has a couple of tweed jackets that I bought in the 60s!
I've got a couple older field coats that are only now reaching their prime, which I define as the time I have to start sewing canvas from a painter's dropcloth (new and unused) into it to close the holes, relining it (the cloth you'd make a flannel shirt from works great - it also makes great rod bags) and replacing the corduroy on the collar and cuffs (more a cosmetic thing).
It's funny, but it seems "hunting" and the outdoor lifestyle that revolves around it are encountering something of a renaissance, at least among the stylish classes. Time was - in my college days - when I'd duck for the weekend and tell people I was going hunting I'd get all sorts of "eww, yick! Killer!" (If I brought back, say, a rabbit to cook for my dinner - I'd hear about it for a year or two.) Now, the same people are saying "Hunting?
Cool. I had no idea.*
Pheasant? Yum!--
* This, of course, just goes to prove that even smart people don't pay attention, have short memories, or just glide through life without getting any depth out of it.
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Whether this renaissance will be something lasting or a passing fad, like flyfishing was among the high demographic when "that Movie" came out - lasting until they figured out it was
hard to do, let alone do well and a new trend came along - remains to be seen. I'm kinda figuring it's like flyfishing and will wind up the same way, only this time in a couple years they'll be trying to sell the overpriced lifestyle guns they bought, instead of ditching a flyrod in the back of a closet. We'll see how they deal with briers....
