“Hey, Pa! This is how farmers dressed in the 1970s,” said one of my daughters via WhatsApp while visiting a Chris Killip retrospective currently showing at The Photographers’ Gallery in Soho.
Her message, and the attached photos, got me thinking about how, and why, my farming peers and I dress as we do…
See also: Opinion: What do the 2020s and 1970s have in common?
Killip took photographs of ordinary people at work – very often embedding himself in the communities he was recording.
The two beautiful and striking photographs in the exhibition that my daughter knew would interest me were shots on the Isle of Man.
One is of farmers at a farm dispersal sale, the other is taken at a livestock market, with farmers crowded cheek by jowl around a covered auction ring.
The farmers at the sale are mostly wearing flat-peaked caps and long, heavy woollen overcoats hanging right down to their ankles.
At the covered auction ring, some of the caps and coats have been taken off to reveal tweed jackets, collared shirts and ties.
But even within this apparent observance of a common mode of dressing, there are subtle differences that suggest that some farmers were differentiating themselves from their peers in terms of social or financial status.
At the farm sale, one man stands out from the flat-peaked caps in a tweed deerstalker hat.
At the livestock auction, another man eschews the tweed jacket, collared shirt and tie worn by most of his peers in favour of a black hunting coat and a high-necked white sweater, suggestive of a stock and gold pin.
My grandfather, who started farming on the South Downs in East Sussex early in the 20th century, was painfully aware of how dress could send a clear message of elevated social status.
At that time, a highly specialised and complex system of arable farming, using folded sheep grazed across catch crops to maintain soil fertility, had established itself on the South Downs between Eastbourne and Worthing.
To signify that they were successful practitioners of their craft, these farmers wore a double height top hat and black tailcoat at work on their farms, at market and in town.
If my grandfather, a dairy farmer, passed these top-hatted peers in the street or in the market he would barely be acknowledged.
Thank goodness such crushing snobbery between farm sectors no longer exists.
But it would be naive to think that farmers have entirely given up sending subtle messages to their peers through their clothes.
Only recently, I was invited for the first time to a “fashion show” of farming workwear at my local machinery dealer’s shop.
Young Farmers’ Clubs provided the models, and they showed off branded wellingtons, work boots, waxed coats, practical trousers and that essential for today’s go-getting farmer – the fleece gilet.
Personally, I’ve never been one to dress in any particular way on the farm.
My farm shirts, trousers and wellies come from my local Age UK charity shop. As my wife puts it: “Your look depends on who died recently, roughly in your size.”
I hate any clothes that display the manufacturer’s logo as I object to being turned into a walking billboard.
Like any other form of snobbery, inverted snobbery seeks both to impress and judge others. But at least my way is cheap.
