When I was growing up, the ‘Duffer’ of St George meant hoodies. You saw them on people like Jamie Oliver and David Beckham, and ripped off in every street market. It seemed to be the definition of an empty hype brand.
But that was the tail end of the Duffer story – the slow decline that saw founders gradually leave and the company sold and then sold again. In the early years it was incredibly innovative, both in terms of the brands it worked with and the styles it started.
From a classic menswear point of view, it brought brands like John Smedley, Lavenham and Mackintosh to prominence. It made Tricker’s cool, and Brady bags. They even had their own tailoring shop on Savile Row.
On the workwear side Duffer was the first to import Red Wing and Woolrich. It popularised Carhartt and Evisu. Vintage trainers weren’t a thing until they started buying up old Nike and Adidas.
Arguably they also came up with the now-ubiquitous look of puffas and trainers. Back in the late 80s no one wore puffa jackets – they were sold in places like ski shops, much like Mackintosh was seen as riding gear. Duffer made all these into items of fashion, of style.
I’d learnt a little of this over the years, but a chance encounter brought me into the heart of it.
Waiting for my train to Gatwick last month, on the way to Pitti, there was only one other person on the platform. He was wearing a sheepskin coat and white jeans – a rare occurrence at 6am in East Dulwich, and I suspected he might be on his way to Florence too.
When I got to the airport, I ran into Billy and Nick from the brand Horatio, and this sheepskin-clad gentleman was with them. Turned out he was Eddie Prendergast, one of the founders of Duffer and later of the shop Present (below). He was also Billy’s Dad (both Billy and Nick worked in Present when it was open) and he lived round the corner.
A lot of stories were swapped on the plane, a few more outside The Fiddler’s Elbow in Florence, and back in East Dulwich, Eddie and I met up for a drink to go through the whole history of Duffer from start to finish.
Eddie is a stand-up guy, and he does have a lot of stories. Back when Duffer started in the mid-eighties, they were selling vintage from a stall in Camden Market. Jeremy Hackett and Red or Dead started doing it around the same time.
A lot of Duffer’s stock back then came from Army surplus stores. “There was this one called Chequers near the Ford factory in Dagenham,” Eddie says. “Ford didn’t supply clothing to their employees, so everyone had to go next door to buy their overalls and chore jackets.
“We went the first time and saw this line of big booths, each filled up with a different size of Levi’s. When the agent came to fill them up, he just dumped the new stock on top of the old, so the old stuff was buried at the bottom – and everyone wanted the new ones anyway.” Eddie and the team bought the bottom of every stack, hundreds of pairs, going right back to the 1950s.
The team travelled to the US too, first of all looking for vintage and later for new stock. “We bought these Schott puffa jackets and nylon coach jackets on Canal Street, and all the guys were laughing at us – stupid limeys! – because no one wanted to wear it.
“But we bought them for five dollars and sold them for fifty back in the UK. No one here had seen these styles before – this was before the internet. They knew the 50s look, baseball jackets and Converse, but this and [Adidas] shell toes were completely new.”
The same thing happened in a shop in Boston, where they discovered hundreds of Nike waffle trainers languishing in the basement. At one point Duffer even approached Nike to remake vintage styles, because they were so popular. Nike said they weren’t interested, they were about innovation, and so the future. How times have changed.
One thing I find interesting about this story is the way Duffer could make things cool – because they were cool, and because there were great menswear shops around the country.
The coolness came from cultural touchstones – they were lauded by The Face magazine and were closely connected to the music scene, running their own club nights. And there was a network of stores to sell it.
“There was no internet, no online shopping, so every local menswear store controlled what guys bought, what they wore to the clubs,” Billy says. “And they wanted Duffer, because that was what was cool in London – it gave them real control.”
It wasn’t just regional stores either. Eventually Duffer were in Selfridge’s and Harrod’s, had one then two shops in Covent Garden, and were sold internationally.
From a style point of view, the most significant thing is probably the way Duffer mixed genres – in much the same way as Ivy style had done. The Duffer guys loved traditional English clothing but also American sportswear, and they pioneered both New Era caps and selvedge denim.
“Back then Tricker’s were for pig breeders, Smedley was underwear and Brady bags were for fishermen – it was what you kept your maggots in,” says Eddie. “We mixed it all together. At one point the look for us was a covert coat with jeans and Red Wings. Or even leather trousers.
“Some Japanese guys were doing this, and they were always the quickest to catch on,” he says. “But no one else was in the US, the UK, certainly Europe. We were disruptors.”
The closest equivalent in recent years has probably been Drake’s or Aimé Leon Dore. Not just in the mixing of genres but the playfulness with which it was all done.
That look of a covert coat with jeans and leather shoes was something Joseph Pollard of August Special brought up in our recent interview. Joseph started at Duffer, and he’s only one of a host of influential people that did.
Brett Roddis, senior designer at North Face for many years, was a contemporary of Pollard’s and moved to the US at the same time. Fraser Moss, founder of YMC, was another, while Charlie Young of Palace was at both Duffer and Present. Duffer was also influential for the founder of Supreme, James Jebbia, who imported it into the US. Oh, and Orlando Bloom worked there.
Throughout its history, Duffer took several sharp turns. “When everyone started doing the urban look, we closed down for a few months and opened up again with a completely new one,” says Eddie. “We hated everyone wearing our stuff – we were snobs basically, always were.”
But at various stages there were disagreements on direction and founding members left. Clifford Bowen left in 1989 and tried to sue the others for future earnings. A majority stake was sold to German Thomas Hiedecker in 1994 and the following year Barrie Sharpe left.
This was when Duffer became mainstream: “Jamie Oliver was wearing it, David Beckham, Mrs Beckham, even little Brooklyn Beckham,” says Eddie. A few years later they licensed the name to Debenhams (not a very high-end store, for those outside the UK). In 2008 the company went into administration and was bought by JD Sports.
Eddie set up Present at that point, and the only other founder left, Marco Cairns, still runs the Japanese arm, owned by conglomerate Itochu (below).
The weird thing today is that searches for Duffer of St George mostly bring up images from these recent years, and only the occasional shot from the past. It’s the problem with being pre-internet.
There was a revival of interest in Duffer in 2014, when a short film was made about their history, but articles from that time are mostly what survive. There’s little else around. (Below is a shot of Eddie from a film on The Face website about Adidas Superstars.)
It seems extraordinary that so many English brands we know were brought into the light by Duffer, and so many American brands were imported for the first time. Memories are short, and it’s easy to think these brands have always been here, always been relevant. It’s also a reminder that without good buyers and consumers, traditional makers could easily slip into obscurity again.
OK, one more story. So at one point, the Duffer guys wanted to sell Hawaiian shirts. No one else seemed to, or not well. They sent an intern to the American embassy in London, because it had a phone book for every state in the US.
“They were told to go through the phone book, and write down every company that had ‘shirt’ in the title,” says Billy. “Then the guys faxed each one and asked for a sample. Later on they ended up going to Hawaii, and relaunching a couple of old brands.
“But in the days before the internet, if you wanted to source an unusual manufacturer, you had to think outside the box.”
One of the other things the Duffer guys introduced was the Yogi style of moccasin boot (above). They became popular in the late nineties and are again now, but Duffer did them in the early nineties, as evidenced by these boots in the Victoria & Albert Museum – one of four Duffer pieces the museum holds – from 1993.
