The Tootal paisley scarf

Abstract

• I’m not sure when I took it, without permission, from my father’s wardrobe. It must have been around 1982, my final year as a fifth-former at a Comprehensive School in Yeovil, Somerset, during a summer of O-Level exam results, teenage parties and those first tentative explorations in establishing a personal style. It was a deep peacock blue, with a frayed fringe and a printed paisley pattern of burgundy botehs, golden dots and a black filigree trace behind. Simply constructed in tubular fashion with one seam, its cotton fabric, soft and pliable like an old oil rag or my mother’s recycled dusters. The small black label read, simply ‘Tootal Regd: Made in England. Wash hand hot – Iron medium hot’. It went perfectly with the tweed jacket and formal cardigan (both with those plaited leather buttons) that I also retrieved from the back clothes hangers of his closet. I recognized the look from the box brownie photographs of my father in the family album from around 1964: paired with pale jeans, pointed boots and a short, neat parting: a newly married student approaching parenthood for the first time. But I was looking for a more contemporary affirmation of taste. I wanted to look like the actor Jeremy Irons in Karel Reiz’s French Lieutenant’s Woman and the Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Tweed and paisley cotton stood in for 1860s romanticism and 1920s homoeroticism in equal measure. Subcultural associations with New Romantic Pop and the Mod revival were at one step removed in provincial Somerset. I hadn’t quite discovered the Kings Road, Camden Market or Carnaby Street on my own steam back then. The true heritage of the clothing in that post-war moment of kitchen sink dramas and social revolution somehow felt closer.