The Boxing Project is announced on the
Leica – Camera Blog

Click on photos to see the post….

……I love Leica I really  do….. xx

Ironing Board Collective mentions Harris Tweed from land to street

The celebrated Harris Tweed orb was first used in 1911, meaning that this year officially marks the fabric’s 100th birthday. Harris tweed has been my obsession for the past few weeks, probably ever since I saw that fabulous couple in Whole Foods. And the obsession won’t stop, now that I know about Lara Platman’s new book Harris Tweed: From Land To Street.

 

Patrick Grant took time out from his crushingly handsome day to write the book’s foreword.

Platman spent seven months in the Outer Hebrides, photographing everyone involved in the process of making the fabric, from the sheep themselves to the spinners, weavers, and even the wool inspectors.

The exhibition is now on at Leica Store Mayfair.

Contact me if you would like to come and visit the show.

Lara

Click on the photo to see full event details.

Please see www.boxingproject.wordpress.com for further information.

http://asuitablewardrobe.dynend.com/2011/11/book-review-harris-tweed.html

Everything old is new again. The harrowing experiences of the past three years of economic uncertainty have reminded us of the values of the classic, of quality and heritage brands and makers. So we are told, and so we were told during the last crises in 2001. Will it last? As before, likely only as long as it takes the inexorable tide of fashion to wash back out again. And each time, this tide carries away a little bit of knowledge, of quality, it erodes the essence of what it holds dear. However, the formerly evergreen woolen Harris Tweed really has undergone a renewal against the backdrop of our reeling world. Lara Platman’s new book Harris Tweed: From Land to Street illustrates what remains of a menswear staple whose continued existence once seemed as bulletproof, unyielding and predictable as the material itself.

Platman makes clear that her book is intended to provide a contemporary record of “photographic portraits” of the people and places now making Harris Tweed, not to provide a definitive history of the material. As such, the book tells its story mainly through its photographs of the different people now involved in handweaving Harris Tweed, each of them bringing a different personal history to this narrative: time spent off the island, interests in engineering or art school or simply in the unassuming routine of weaving that occupies free hours of retirement.

Platman doesn’t dwell on the recent events that led Harris Tweed’s fate to hang, as it were, by a single thread: as mills gradually closed one by one, the number of weavers declined and supply bottlenecked. A providential white knight who took over one of the last remaining mills nearly delivered Harris Tweed a coup de grâce in cutting production from 8,000 patterns to just four, according to Savile Row Style magazine, and it took new investors and the efforts of a few dedicated industry professionals to come in and ensure the survival of the two other remaining mills on Harris and Lewis. The number of weavers is now on the upswing. One such industry supporter, Patrick Grant, the owner of Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons, writes an emotional foreword to this book.

Harris Tweed: From Land to Street’s lavish photographs suggest parallels between Harris Tweed and the isles from which it hails: rugged as their windlashed coasts, subtly colored as their fields of heather, timeless as their standing stones. This timelessness may be illusory: we know the lives recorded in these evocative portraits may be as precarious as the ways of life in more developed areas, teetering between being overrun by the dross or simply being washed away by the tide. Savor the book with a dram of Ardbeg Corryvreckan and a whisper of ice, and you may hear the isles whisper to you.

-Réginald-Jérôme de Mans

For the full review please see:

http://asuitablewardrobe.dynend.com/2011/11/book-review-harris-tweed.html

I have just seen that my book is reviewed in a newspaper over on the other side of the Atlantic 

click the photos to go to see newspaper article in full

The Veteran Car run 2011 London to Brighton, Lara reports for  BBC Pictures

Today a lovely write up by Patrick Grant a contributor for GQ and the lovely chap that wrote the Foreword for my book Harris Tweed.

Read it here in GQ