Nigel Cabourn

Nigel Cabourn was born in 1949 and studied design at what is now Northumbria University in Newcastle, the city where he worked for the rest of his life. He founded his own label in the 1970s and built it on a single method he never really deviated from. He collected old clothes, thousands of them, and designed from the objects rather than from ideas about them. The Jesmond studio holds a vintage archive of more than four thousand garments and a reference library of some three thousand books, and every collection was drawn out of it. He died in June 2026.

The archive was almost entirely military, workwear, and expedition kit, and the sources stay legible in the finished clothes. The best known piece he ever made, the Mallory jacket, fused a Harris tweed of the kind George Mallory wore on Everest in 1924 with the shoulder patch from the 1953 expedition and Ventile at the shoulders and elbows. It was never a stitch-for-stitch reproduction. It was a reading.

Nigel Cabourn at W Department

W Department stocks Cabourn across FW24, SS24, and SS26 in menswear and womenswear, and the naming tells you exactly what you are looking at: British Army Pant, British Officer’s Shirt, Fireman Jacket, Swedish Motorcycle Jacket, Jeep Coat, Cricket Vest, Farmer Pant, Railman Denim Pant, French Work Jacket. Cabourn split his making between Britain and Japan, and these come from the Japanese side. The materials matter as much as the patterns, and they are unusual for the category: hemp herringbone twill in the Farmer Pant, a hemp and cotton Fireman Jacket in indigo, a wool, hemp, and cotton Cobbler Jacket, linen in the Cricket Vest and the Field Pant, nylon in the Jeep Coat.

We carry the line for the reason people have always carried it. The clothes are researched rather than styled, and research holds its value after the season is over.

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Continue Exploring

• All Nigel Cabourn. Every one made in Japan.
• Engineered Garments. Daiki Suzuki’s New York house, drawn from the same workwear and military sources.
• Coats and jackets. Outerwear across the whole roster.
• Trousers. Every trouser and pant we carry.
• Visit W Department. 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza, open daily, 11 to 5.

Shop Nigel Cabourn