He's gotta have it

From the man who collects swing tickets to the one who wants to be cremated in his favourite parka - enter the weird world of the male fashion obsessive.

BY Sheryl Garratt | 26 March 2011

For Oliver Beer, it all started quite innocuously, at a football match in 1985. He was watching his beloved Stoke City play when he noticed another fan wearing a handsome-looking jumper with a logo he had never seen before. They got talking, and the man explained that it was Stone Island, a new brand by an Italian designer called Massimo Osti. Afterwards Beer tried looking for it, but this was before the internet, before there were designer clothes available in every city centre and mail-order catalogue, and he drew a blank until the next year, when a shop called Review in Newcastle-under-Lyme began selling it. He bought his first piece - a sweatshirt - as soon as he could afford it. 'I've still got it. It cost me a week's wages.'

Beer was working nights as a printer for a national newspaper, so when eBay came along in 1995 he had time in the day to surf the German and Italian sites, buying rare jackets by Stone Island, CP Company and other labels that Osti had designed for. 'I was snapping up coats I'd never seen,' he says. 'Talking to the people who were selling them, I learnt more and more about the label. And it just mushroomed. I loved all the quirky details, and the weird materials they used: glass, metal, paper. The first ones, the Marina range, were made out of old yacht sails. It was so different from anything else I'd seen.'

At one point, Beer owned more than 200 coats, although he has now slimmed his collection down to about 50. 'I couldn't see the point of having boxes and boxes of jackets in my loft that weren't getting the use that they're designed for,' he says. 'But I've still got a lot of the older, rarer pieces, the quirkier bits which I like. People come to the house and say, "Can I have a look at your jackets?" And I'll spend two or three hours in the back bedroom, talking about them. I love having conversations when you go into the detail: why is that zip like that?'

I'm wondering how many of those visitors are women, and Beer laughs and says none at all. 'My missus thinks I'm crackers,' he says cheerfully. 'She'll bring up a cup of tea and take the mickey out of us: "This jacket's got goggles on, this jacket's got a torch on!" But over the years she's learnt to put up with it.'

Although he has pruned his collection, Beer is still buying and selling. He's a postman now, but his online trading pays for his family holidays. The day we talked, he had just bought a Stone Island NOC-1 jacket. 'It's got a rubber hood that's based on a helicopter pilot's helmet,' he says lovingly. 'I've had two hoods for years, but I never got round to finding the winter jacket. This one came on eBay, and the guy had an absolutely dire description of it, but I knew what it was. I paid about £50.' The most he has ever paid for a coat was £800; but he has sold them on for as much as £1,800.

He had also acquired a field jacket with multiple pockets by an Osti offshoot label called Left Hand, and was buying back a shooting jacket with rubber patches on the elbows and shoulder that he sold to a friend in Reading a few years ago. He won't be doing any shooting in it, he adds, but he will wear it to the match on Saturday - he and his son are Stoke City season ticket holders. Oliver Junior is 11, and already owns a Stone Island goosedown coat. 'It's really nice,' his father says wistfully. 'But at the moment he's more interested in Lego.'

Still, Beer believes in planning for the future. In his will, he has specified which coat he would like to be cremated in: a 1988 CP Company parka with a rabbit-fur hood.

Obsessions such as this are not as unusual among men as you might think. 'I think guys in general are quite obsessive about details and collecting stuff,' says Fraser Cooke, a former skateboarder who has turned his encyclopaedic knowledge of streetwear into a career in fashion. 'They're into information and kit, and if they're interested in fashion, they'll go deep on that, just like they would on knowing about cars, or trainspotting.'

Cooke lives in Toyko now, and works with Nike in a job that was pretty much invented to make use of his vast store of contacts and specialist knowledge. He flies around the world organising events and collaborations, commissioning limited-edition trainers for obsessives like himself and placing them in hip boutiques to keep the brand's cool edge. Most of the major brands have learnt to work with collectors in this way, reissuing classic styles and making limited editions of new products. For obsessives such as Cooke, of course, this means it's time to move on. Few of his own clothes are branded now, he says, and his most precious pieces tend to be custom-made, or beautifully detailed copies of originals, given a fresh twist: his current favourites include a custom-fitted Lewis Leathers jacket and a loving copy of the 1950s classic MA1 flying jacket, made slightly longer with a slimmer, more flattering, contemporary fit.

Most of Cooke's friends are similarly obsessed. Nigo is the founder of the cult streetwear label A Bathing Ape. 'I went to his house the other week,' Cooke says, 'and he's got a crazy collection not only of 1950s American clothing but of fixtures and fittings from the shops: giant jeans, neon signs, display cabinets. He also collects vintage Louis Vuitton trunks, and they're stacked in his hallway with a Colonel Sanders statue next to them, and an old Apple Mac with the rainbow logo. And vintage furniture. He basically just collects anything he's into.'

Then there's the Japanese street fashion guru Hiroshi Fujiwara, who owns pretty much every piece Vivienne Westwood made for her Seditionaries shop in the late 1970s, as well as one of the world's best collections of Rolex 'Paul Newman' Daytona watches. 'You can pay £75,000 for one now, although he got into it before it was quite that expensive,' Cooke says.

For men, Cooke adds, it's all about belonging, feeling part of a tribe or gang, and the quiet pleasure of getting a nod from another connoisseur who recognises that your watch, jacket or shoes are something rare and special.

James Shaw, the 30-year-old co-owner of the menswear label Albam, agrees that the way to get most men excited about clothes is to give them the facts, the story behind them. His three shops in London don't only sell jeans, for instance. They sell 'dry denim', woven on narrower Japanese looms to produce the selvedge that indicates high quality, and are designed to be worn but never washed, so that the creases gradually show the personality of the wearer. 'It's the small things that matter to a guy,' he says. 'We geek out about stuff - the movement on the watch, the stitch on a pair of jeans. Some men are brought into the shop by their girlfriends and aren't interested in clothes. But if you explain that a jumper is knitted at a certain factory and why, they get involved. It's a bit of knowledge, and knowledge is power.'

The Albam team obsess about every detail on their clothes, and are constantly changing these details as they find better ways of doing them. This, Shaw says, does not go unnoticed by their regular customers. 'We did a fisherman's kagoul when we first started, and every production run was different, because there was always something we could improve on: the buttons, the thread count, the draw-cord. And we get guys sending the original ones back in so they can have them upgraded with the new details. People even collect our swing tickets, which is quite cool. One man emailed us from Russia asking us to send a new swing ticket, because it's not the same as the one on the first jacket he bought, and he wanted them to match.'

One of the reasons such small details matter is, of course, that menswear is still much more conservative that women's fashion, with far less variety. 'Let's face it, you can't get away with really wacky, super-trendy fashion unless you're young,' Cooke says. 'You look ridiculous. Women can go with quite extreme fashion changes from season to season, but for men there are certain key things that remain popular, that work. So it's about doing those well. A good watch is the same as having a statement bag for a woman really. You can be wearing just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, but if you've got the right watch, it can speak quite loudly.'

Dan Adams, a 45-year-old graphic designer, is into American workwear: work shoes and boots, vintage denim, and Pendleton plaid shirts are particular favourites. He dresses his four-year-old son in vintage OshKosh dungarees - 'they have to be from America, and at least 20 years old' - and owns nine Pendletons, which he admits is more than he really needs. 'The old ones just had the most beautiful plaids, in this amazing thick, almost blanket-like wool,' he says.

Adams says buying vintage is a way of looking individual in a world where everything is increasingly mass-produced, but also something that feels reassuringly constant. 'When the rate of change has become so accelerated, you want to tap into something that you know has some sort of history. It's looked good since the day it was made, it still looks good, so it's a sure bet. What I've always liked about vintage is that it's had a life before me, so it's not as throwaway. Anyone can buy designer now, but these things are harder to find. You've got to put the work in. It's the hunter-gatherer genes kicking in, and I find that way more satisfying than walking into Zara and just buying a shirt. It's all nicely cut and well made, but so what? It's a really dull, supermarket-style shopping experience.'

The chase, the hunt for that vintage bargain or rare piece is part of the pleasure, then. 'It's like searching for the Holy Grail,' Beer says. 'But it's almost an anticlimax when I actually get them. You're like, "Well, what's the next thing?" '