Walk on the wild side
Have you ever discovered that you have become fashionable by accident? Wildfowlers shared this experience a few years ago when metropolitan young men intentionally started sporting beards and looking unkempt.
A game shooter’s garb, no longer ancient and malodorous, is now ‘cottagecore’, according to The Guardian’s fashion correspondent Priya Elan, who describes the look as a “romanticised ideal of masculinity”. Reared driven shooting has been en vogue for more than a century. The Edwardians, the bright young things of the 1920s, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, David Beckham, Wills and Kate – for generations the place for the ‘in crowd’ to be seen was at covert-side.
“To receive a bag at all requires hard toil by the Guns and even more labour from keepers and landowners”
The antithesis to all this glamour has been rough shooting, walked-up or driven days
