The Art of Making

Michael and Elsie Frazer in their bespoke tailoring shop in the village of Hospital, Ireland   /   Noel Mullins photo

I read a report recently in The Sunday Times that ‘Fast Fashion,’ a term for the impulse buying of clothes online and in stores that people wear just a few times and then discard, contributes 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year into the atmosphere. In the USA alone, 13 million tons of clothing are thrown into landfills or burned. In the UK, 300,000 tons of clothing end up in landfills, an interesting statistic in that the public is often led to believe, incorrectly, that farmers are to blame for all the unwanted emissions.

Those in the hunting fields, however, used to see family after family who wore hunting attire passed down from prior generations. What was their secret?