Nigel Cabourns clothing is some of the most in demand and highly prized by a certain
kind of fashion victim as well as history buffs with a penchant for vintage styled and inspired clothing. Nigel was born in the United Kingdom in 1949 and he first attended Newcastle Upon Tyne Fashion College when he was just seventeen years old. Cabourn started a clothing label under his own name while he was still in his final year of his studies at Northumbria University in the North of England in 1971.
The story goes that he found an old diary that belonged to his father from the year 1941 when his father was in the British Army. This diary was about Mr. Cabourn seniors time in the army and it contained sketches of the clothing that the armed personnel wore at the time. Nigel found this diary and started to design clothing based on the sketches he found in it and based his first collection around these sketches.
Today, many decades later Nigel is still making the same kind of clothes and he and his team of designers and apprentices still work out of the same converted gardeners house in the cold and windy north of England. He now has one of the most enviable archives of over four thousand individual pieces of vintage military wear and all his collections are based on these tough, honest pieces of clothing that hark back to simpler times when fashion was not as important as it is today.
Amazingly despite their origins, his clothes are some of the most sought after fashion pieces today and are very often sold out in high fashion stores around the world. Nigels clothing lines are authentic in more ways than one. The pieces of clothing form one of the few collections that are still produced in the United Kingdom. The really amazing part is that the British factories used to produce these garments are in some cases the very same ones that produced clothing for the British Army as long ago as in world wars one and two.
Nigel has two lines in his collection, the Main line also known as Green Label and the Authentic line. Both of them are designed by him, though the Green Label consists of garments made in Japan. This is because the styles involved are produced to better effect in Japan, in factories that Nigel himself has approved. The Green Label has styles that need refined artistic skills and special dyeing and washing techniques that Japanese garment makers are very good at.