The wearing of a pair of jeans with a tailored jacket has become the stuff of stylistic cliche. It’s a kind of concession both to the received wisdom that tailoring is often stiff in image and form relative to denim, and likewise that denim can lack the formality to see you at home in certain settings. When it comes to tailoring and workwear, perhaps really never the twain shall meet.

But that’s not an obvious conclusion: after all, while America may have been built by the denim-clad and France by men in moleskin, at least for the early decades of the British 20th century, tailoringwasworkwear. Men typically wore a tailored jacket as much to dig roads as to file accounts; archive images of pit workers - begrimed with soot, leaving the colliery to head home - are striking today for the fact that they seem to show men in suits, albeit battered ones. Likewise even the well-to-do wore tailoring to partake in more active, country pursuits, whether that be leisure or land management: all that changed was one or two functional details and the hardiness of the cloth.