Why won’t they throw away their old clothes?

My husband has a couple of old tweed jackets that he doesn’t wear, so much as retreat to for sanctuary. They are so softened by use that they’ve become wool versions of those comfy, armchairs you find in old-fashioned men’s clubs. I’ve lost count of the times they’ve been taken to a tailor for elbow patches, new linings and reinforced pockets. You could buy a fine new jacket several times over for the cost of the repairs, but that’s irrelevant to these garments’ owner. He returns to them for comfort and what a fashion editor might call “timeless style” (i.e. dressing like an Edwardian). They are protective, talismanic even.

I suspect my spouse truly thinks Harris tweed can repel Wi-Fi signals, Twitter, Scientologists and the evil eye. It certainly helps ward away the 21st century. So we both laughed when Prince Charles was pictured out and about in Cumbria in an Anderson & Shepherd tweed coat that was debuted 30 years ago.The coat’s inspiration is even more retro, modelled as it was on a coat worn for 23 years by Charles’s great uncle, Edward VIII. That, of course, is what all men are doing when they wear tweed: channelling generations of male forebears, furrowing their brows as they think of pipe smoke, disappearing hedgerows, Arthur Conan Doyle and the sound of a Spitfire’s Merlin engine overhead.

I am endlessly touched by men’s sentimental attachment to old clothes: Shetland jumpers that are more hole than whole, Panama hats missing half the crown, shirts with collars so frayed you can plait the edges. One barrister friend, who’s just turned 50, has been wearing the same leather jacket since his student days. No matter that, nowadays, he’s more Sid James than James Dean.

An old boyfriend owned cowboy boots so old they could have been disinterred with Tollund man, and he was hardly unique. When I visited the Northampton workshops of Edward Green (purveyors of fine brogues), I was amazed by the distressed remnants of footwear that were returned to the factory for “repairs”, after decades of hard use. The toes of these brogues were often stuffed with a lifetime’s accumulation of dog hair.

I am endlessly touched by men’s sentimental attachment to old clothes: Shetland jumpers that are more hole than whole, Panama hats missing half the crown ...

The reconstruction work that followed was so forensic it was like watching a 3D-imager build a whole face from the remnants of half a jawbone. Edward Green’s clients obviously felt that if they’d been carried through life safely, thus far, by a certain pair of shoes, they’d provoke the Fates by changing soles.

I’m lucky in that my husband has no attachment to old undies, but I’ve heard of men who store lucky boxers and shooting socks. Not that I can mock; I have my own deep-rooted attachment to ancient hosiery. I’m particularly attached to a pair of opaque Wolford tights that were filched from the Vogue fashion cupboard circa 1992 by one of the IT department’s Robin Hoods — who termed it “redistributing fashion”.

I’d never worn tights of that quality before and was fascinated by the way they didn’t ladder. Twentythree years later, the pantyhose is still in service and miraculously unimpaired. I like to think I’ll still be trotting them out when I’m 90. Because the other boost you get from old clothes is the warm, Ready Brek glow of sheer vanity. Your boast to the world is you’re still the same size you were in your twenties. That pleasure is surely as rich for a Prince as any pauper.