Photos by Chris Floyd

LAST WEEK Esquire fashion magazine sent their style director to Pembrokeshire to see if he could find clothes he would sport on the streets of London, in the counties local shops.

Style director for the magazine, Teo van den Broeke came to “The nation’s least densely populated region with £200 and a simple instruction: go shopping.” The task brief out laid.

Teo set out to see if he could prove that it is possible for a young man to dress with style and finesse wherever they live in the UK, so to do this he chose to start in St Davids: “I was to spend a day in the middle of nowhere, scouring local shops for wearable, affordable and, yes, even fashionable clothing that I would willingly bring back to London and absorb into my everyday wardrobe.”

Starting in the nations smallest city, he visited a charity shop to find his first piece of clothing: “The charity shop is run by a pair of charming ladies, Grace Davies and Mary Trott. They told me that they’d recently dressed a 16-year-old local boy for a “do” for 50 pence.”

“In that spirit, I snapped up a chunky teal fishmerman’s jumper for the bargain price of four pounds.”

Motivated by the first purchase he continued, and asked Oliver Blakiston, the young manager of St Davids’ Cross Hotel,where he shops: “I never buy clothes from St Davids, ever. If I’m going away, or if I’m going to Cardiff, I go shopping there. If I need anything proper, I go to the bigger shops in Haverfordwest,”

Taking on board part of what Oliver said, Teo then took a trip to Haverfordwest where he met with Matthew Locke from Mathews Menswear where he was told that youngsters looking to get the latest trends of clothing have to shop further afield to get them.

He delved deeper into the Men’s outfitters and found a number of pieces he liked, but most out of budget he said: “With prices starting around £200 a pair they were beyond my budget, but still prove that Haverfordwest is by no means a dead loss in the style stakes.”

Visiting The Pines, further along the road, Teo spoke with store owner Kayleigh Rogers who he said: “shed some light on the way local men dress.”

She said: “It’s funny, when you go out you can tell who the younger lads are, because they’re the ones who get suited and booted. They want to dress like the Essex boys they see on TV,” she laughs. “But as guys get older they slowly morph back into the Pembrokeshire way and just wear scabby jeans and T-shirts out. My friend Adam is the only person I know who is into designer clothes, but he can only get that stuff in London. He even went up to Edinburgh to buy a coat last week. That’s how far you need to go for good stuff.”

After talking with these shop owners and not finding anything he himself would wear, he then headed back towards St Davids and stopped at Solva where he visited the wool mill, he explained: “Set on the edge of a tiny stream and enveloped by overgrown pine trees, the mill looked like the kind of place where your grandma would have bought clothes back in the day,”

He continued: “with walls made of wood, and woollen jumpers, scarves and blankets piled up to the (dangerously low) ceiling.”

At the wool mill he found a knitted wool tie, which he described as: “a snip at £14”, he also said that the tie: “wouldn’t have looked out of place on the shelves of Drake’s in Mayfair.

At the same mill Chris Floyd, Esquire photographer bought a knitted fisherman’s jumper for £40.

So he carried on: “With a more positive head on my wool-clad neck, I headed back to Haverfordwest on a lead that there was an army surplus store somewhere in town that I’d missed first time around.”

At Brewer Army Surplus on Bridge Street he found a number of pieces he liked and explained his thoughts when he began to search: “I felt what was left of the £200 start to burn a hole in my pocket.”

At Brewers he bought a cropped navy-blue RAF bomber jacket for £18, a ribbed, midnight blue jumper with elbow patches for £20, a pair of bleached denim Lee jeans which he described as costing less than a lunch from Whole Foods in London at only £14.

And finally he purchased an M65 jacket for £30 which he went on to explain: “the nip in the waist and density of fabric made me think of something I tried on in Saint Laurent a few years ago (though that jacket came in at around £800)”.

He compared many of the things he found to be similar to those in fashion shows he had recently attended, and said that despite a few panicked hours searching he thinks it is more than possible to dress well, even if you live in the back end of beyond.”