GQ (April 2010 issue)
A stitch in time

From Long Eaton with love… Sunspel was a Great British institution long before James Bond donned its mesh shirts, says Nick Foulkes.

I must confess that of late I have not given underwear an awful lot of thought; I tend to have Sir Stuart Rose knock up my Marks & Spencer underwear, or I pick up a couple of packs of Brooks Brothers briefs when I am passing through New York; but in future I can see my travels taking me more frequently to Long Eaton in the east Midlands, home to the Sunspel factory.

I love visiting factories, particularly British ones such as Sunspel, which reminds me of the Rolls-Royce and Bentley works in Crewe when I first visited them almost 20 years ago. The firm was started in 1860 and remained in the hands of its founding family until five years ago when it was bought by a likeable pair called Nick Brooke and Dom Hazlehurst.

Brooke and Hazlehurst are slightly younger than me but are old enough to remember the essays in marketing that were the advertisements featuring Sunspel in the Eighties: a woman naked except for a pair of boxer shorts and the contents of three tins of hairspray that had created a look that was part Sloane Ranger, part Bonnie Tyler. It was this image, or Levi’s buff, hard-bodied Nick Kamen, stripping down to his Sunspels in a coin-operated laundry, that was the apotheosis of the Eighties male underwear experience.

Such is the Proustian power of British boxer shorts that stepping into the Sunspel factory I thought for a moment that I had been sent, Ashes to Ashes style, back to the era of “Frankie says” T-shirts.

But I think anyone might be forgiven for thinking they had gone back in time when visiting Sunspel. Once, Britain was covered with factories such as this: the clatter of sewing machines working at full pelt as skilled seamstresses stitched together vast quantities of knickers and vests.

What I like about Sunspel is that it has maintained its roots in this classic manufacturing culture. The jersey fabric comes from Hinckley, the cellular mesh is knitted in Shepshed close to Loughborough and the fabrics are dyed in Leicester… a tidy commercial ecosystem that flourishes within a radius of a few miles. Forget globalisation, this is localisation and I like it – almost as much as I like the cellular mesh polo shirts made by Sunspel and worn by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. Apparently they were dreamt up by the previous owner Peter Hill, who came up with a mesh of such gossamer lightness and ineffable comfort that it appealing to Lindy Hemming, the costume designer behind Bond.

But what I like most about the Sunspel story is that it all happens more or less by accident. Take the Bond thing. If you think it was all strategic thinking and forward planning then think again. Hemming came to the Sunspel boys through a mutual acquaintance, and when they met her formally it was, in the best British fashion, for a cup of tea and a chat, and Hazlehurst happened to be wearing one of the polo shirts with which Hemming fell in love.

And that is the strength of Sunspel, people love it, it speaks to them. Robert Elms, also of this parish and himself a stylist of considerable accomplishment, is a long-term admirer and apparently Sunspel has reached dimensions of a Kool-Aid cult in Japan.

In fact, I can think of only one thing that Nick and Dom can do to improve the brand and that would be to reintroduce the advertising campaign featuring the topless lady with the big hair.