He may have boasted tailoring from Hawkes of Savile Row, but Withnail’s coat has a much more complicated history.
It’s easy for depictions of 1960s Britain to be enamoured with an idealised, cartoonish vision of swinging decadence. While no doubt a great swath of British pop culture from the period indulged in colourful happenings – understandably considering how fresh it must have seemed after the first decade or so of the Post-War years and their austerity – the same excuse cannot be given for retrospective dramas set in the decade.
Cultural depictions of the 1960s seemed to split by the end of the 1980s, with some still buying into the groovy colour defined by everything from flower power to Granny Takes a Trip. The other half, in stark contrast, focussed on a faded, bricks-and-mortar version (I think the truth of the decade is likely housed somewhere between the two), and there are few better examples of this than Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I (1987).
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Set in 1969, the decade has taken on its toll on the two out-of-work actors at the centre of the story: the upper-class drunk, Withnail (Richard E. Grant), and his paranoid, timid acquaintance, Marwood (Paul McGann). In almost any other film, their world would have been splashed with psychedelic colour; their flat a kaleidoscopic funfair, their lives carefree, and their trips variously sunny and swinging. Instead, the decade has brought them into Dickensian poverty, a decrepit gentility even, while housed in a Camden flat collapsing under the weight of rubbish. Only an accidental holiday to the rain-sodden Lake District offers a glimmer of (false) hope.
No doubt much of the film’s bite comes from Robinson’s own experiences of the decade, but the one aspect where this distinctive and refreshing characteristic is present most in the film is in its costumes. Withnail and Marwood are the most unswinging pair imaginable, in spite of getting smashed and high throughout. Marwood favours a leather coat and some general jumpers and jeans. The really interesting clothing choices are, however, in the more obviously aristocratic Withnail. As Withnail proudly proclaims to the drug dealer Danny (Ralph Brown) when the ominous man notices that Withnail is wearing a suit, “This suit was cut by Hawkes of Savile Row!”