From a View to a Twill
According to Gentleman’s Gazette, "Tweed is as close to British national dress as you might get”, so it’s fitting that Bond, that other icon of Britishness with Scottish origins, has worn it on multiple occasions - on screen that is. In the books, Bond only wears tweed once. Why is this? Why does Fleming put his villains in the fabric but rarely his hero? And does Fleming’s own wardrobe give us any insights into how he felt about tweed?
The scent and sweat of wearing tweed can be nauseating at three in the afternoon on a summer’s day…
The first reference to tweed occurs in Chapter 5 of Casino Royale. An exquisite passage - one of my favourites in all of Fleming - allows us to soak up the atmosphere of the hotel bar where Bond sits, waiting to meet Mathis. Bond’s gaze takes in the patrons, the men “drinking inexhaustible quarter-bottles of champagne” and the women doing the same with “dry martinis”. Perhaps their thirst can be attributed to the heat? The action of Casino Royale takes place in summer, a time for wearing lighter fabrics. Bond is entirely justified, then, in deeming the tweeds worn by one of the men to be “unseasonable”. While less perspiration-inducing tweed do exist, it’s not exactly a fabric that screams ‘summer’.
Like Bond and Fleming, heat-retaining, hard-wearing tweed has Scottish origins. While etymology is often multiple choice, the most reliable origin story for the word ‘tweed’ is this: an English buyer of cloth misheard a Scottish merchant’s mispronunciation of 'twill', perhaps assuming it was something to do with the River Tweed, which flows from the borders of Scotland into northern England.
Despite the quintessentially British nature of tweed, by the third Bond novel, Diamonds Are Forever, we are getting the idea that Fleming might not be its biggest fan - at least when it’s removed from its Scottish origins. When Bond’s plane to the USA has a layover in Ireland, he takes a glance at the airport shops, only to be horrified by the “junk” he finds. Amidst the Irish harps and brass leprechauns he finds “furry, unwearable tweeds”.
What are we to read into Fleming putting several of his most memorable villains in tweed? They include Red Grant in From Russia, With Love, who first makes Bond’s acquaintance while wearing an “old reddish-brown tweed coat”. However, an even surer signifier, to Bond at least, that Grant might be a wrong ‘un is his affectation for tying his tie with a Windsor knot (“Bond mistrusted anyone who tied his tie with a Windsor knot. It showed too much vanity.”)
Auric Goldfinger is attired head-to-toe in tweed when Bond meets him on the golf course:
“Everything matched in a blaze of rust-coloured tweed from the buttoned 'golfer's cap' centred on the huge, flaming red hair, to the brilliantly polished, almost orange shoes.”
As a redhead myself, I’m choosing to believe my hero is not appalled at the shade of Goldfinger’s hair, but merely the way its shade clashes with his golfing getup.
It takes until Thunderball to get the first evidence that Fleming might not be entirely hostile towards tweed. Fleming modelled - visually at least - Thunderball’s Count Lippe on his very close friend Ivar Bryce. And while Lippe is a deplorable villain, Bond can’t help casting an approving eye over his good looks. Lippe is “dressed in the sort of casually well-cut beige herring-bone tweed that suggests Anderson and Sheppard”. Fleming telling us the suit is “well-cut” and name checking the revered Savile Row tailor who did the cutting suggests tweed can work - when it’s done well.
The next Bond novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, has us sitting back on the fence as far as Fleming’s feelings towards tweed go. The tweed-wearer this time is the Secret Service’s head of scientific research, someone who doesn’t expend too much mental energy on their manner of dress. Fleming tells us he wears tweeds which are “shaggy”, in contrast with Lippe’s “well-cut” tweeds. Nevertheless, he is “appropriately dressed”. The only fashion crime he commits is this: “his knitted woollen tie didn’t cover his collar stud”.
Bond forms a less favourable impression of another tweed-attired Secret Service staff member in the short story The Living Daylights, although Bond’s disdain for Berlin Station’s Number Two has little to do with his clothing (he wears “well-cut, well-used, light-weight tweeds in a dark green herringbone”) and more to do with his being a metaphorical stuffed shirt.
Perhaps the most intriguing use of tweed in Fleming is in the short story For Your Eyes Only where Bond himself wears it.
Bond wears a variety of different suits across the fourteen books, and while we might reasonably assume that several could be made of tweed, this is the only time Fleming specifically mentions that Bond is wearing the fabric.
In For Your Eyes Only, on an off-the-books mission for M, Bond finds himself having to rough it on an assassination mission in the wilds of Canada. When he arrives at Mounted Police HQ, Bond gets more than merely local intel: he also gets fashion advice. The Mountie colonel runs his eyes over “Bond’s old black and white hound’s-tooth tweed suit” and urges him to change into something more rustic, in-keeping with the environment. He tells Bond to go shopping at the local second-hand clothing store for camouflage: “Nothing fancy, nothing conspicuous - khaki shirt, dark brown jeans, good climbing-boots or shoes.”
Fleming mentions Bond’s penchant for loudly-checked black and white suits as early as Moonraker, where he puts on a “battered black and white dogtooth suit”. It’s not necessarily a tweed suit in Moonraker. While many things may look like tweed, to be authentic, the raw wool must be dyed before it is spun, as opposed to be dyed after it has been spun. Dogstooth refers to the pattern, not necessarily the fabric. And we might reasonably assume that this particular suit is the same “black and white dog-tooth suit” from Diamonds Are Forever, which Fleming tells us Bond wears “for the country and for golf”. In this latter instance, the suit is referred to as “lightweight”, not a word one associates with tweed (although lighter-weight tweeds are a thing).
Fleming’s own tweed golfing jacket was not dissimilar to Bond’s outfit in For Your Eye Only. Said jacket sold at auction for over £1000 in 2010. But rather than Bond’s black and white houndstooth, Fleming’s had a very loud black and white shepherd check, making it an even more conspicuous fashion statement!
Fleming’s golfing jacket. Photograph from Bonhams.
Is Fleming’s intention at the beginning of For Your Eyes Only to make Bond look like a slightly ridiculous fish out of water, his urbane stylings clashing with the rustic environs of his mission? Is Fleming perhaps gently satirising his own unconventional taste in clothing?
Fleming frequently felt like an outsider in his own family; he despised their love of hunting, a pastime that would no doubt require no end of tweedy apparel. Many of the Bond stories feature scenes where characters earn Bond’s (and the reader’s) enmity by being needlessly cruel to animals. The object of Bond’s hunt in For Your Eyes Only is a mere human being (and a despicable one at that), so Bond retains our sympathy. It’s the closest we get to a portrayal of the hunts for which Fleming held such disdain - and it’s not a straightforward depiction but a subversion. For the action of the story, Fleming has Bond change out of his somewhat outré dogstooth suit into something more practical.
So why put Bond in a tweed suit to begin with? There’s a lot of psychology we could unpack here. Fleming, while fascinated by psychology and a self-confessed ‘neurotic’, was reluctant to probe too deeply into himself. And while we should be cautious of drawing straightforward parallels between creator and creation, maybe that’s why Fleming poured so much of Bond’s inner life onto the page.
Perhaps then, we can read Fleming’s decision to have Bond wear an eye-catching subversion of traditional tweed as another signifier of Bond’s outsider-insider status. Like his creator, Bond should be seen a both a part of the Establishment - and apart from it.
