FASHION
Dressed B
USINESS IS booming at Oliver Brown. Trade in January and February this year was 30 per cent up on 2012. April looks as if it’s going to be around 20 per cent up, and Royal Ascot – the shop’s busiest time – is just around the corner.
Suddenly, English style is in demand, and few shops are as English as Oliver Brown, the ladies’ and gentlemen’s outfitters on Lower Sloane Street. Fancy a velvet smoking jacket, a grouse butt marker or a tippling stick? Then Oliver Brown is just the place for you. “We do swimming trunks to tweed suits to dinner jackets to smoking jackets to hunting and shooting kit,” says owner Kristian Robson. “We’re a one-stop shop, really.” He’s an affable chap, Robson, self-deprecating in that very mild manner that true Englishmen have (even though he’s half Norwegian). He smiles when he says that because he was dyslexic he went to “some pretty strange schools” around England before studying at Cirencester. Then he adds: “Went there for three years, came out with nothing but had the best time of my life. My father called it a country club.” It was also the start of his career in fashion because as a student at Cirencester he began buying and selling top hats almost accidentally.
“My father invited me to Ascot,” he says. “I bought a top hat for £50 from Portobello Road and sold it round the corner for £200.”
He kept on buying and selling, advertising in The Field
and Country Life and finally selling hats from an outfitters called Buckley’s not far from his current business on Lower Sloane Street.
It was a clever move. The production of silk top hats ceased around 1980, and prices rose as a result. These days a mint-condition silk hat in a modern hat size (our heads are bigger than our predecessors, apparently) can fetch tens of thousands of pounds, and the business that Robson fell into at college is now a significant part of Oliver Brown. Buckley’s initially took a commission on sales of the top hats and, with a certain inevitability, Robson ended up working there as manager for three years.
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FO R ASCO T
Oliver Brown on Lower Sloane Street is one of the few places you can still buy a silk top hat for Royal Ascot. Erik Brown took coffee with owner Kristian Robson
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