Nigel Cabourn obituary

“I’m like a big giant sieve of history and I just turn it into the clothes,” said Nigel Cabourn of the inspiration for his decades of quietly influential designs for men’s clothes. He has died aged 76. For Cabourn, history most often meant war: his grandfather’s memories of the first world war trenches, his father’s stories of Burma in the second, and his own awareness of US field jackets and uniform novelties from Vietnam paired with jeans after 1968.

He drew on mountaineering and polar expeditions too, and even the dark-clad figure of Lev Yashin in goal in 1958. Details mattered to him as function rather than decoration — pleated bellows pockets, for example, were designed to hold ammunition or a day’s rations — and he celebrated their usefulness even as some teased him for what they called “trainspotter chic.” His career began conventionally enough.

Aged 20 in 1969, while studying at Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design, he started Cricket, making well-made youthful menswear that Paul Smith stocked in 1973.

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