Maloviere - Interview in the Guardian - G2 30.04.07 The close-up by Imogen Fox, Portrait by Eamon McCabe

The Close-Up
Maloviere, English Tutor

Interview by Imogen Fox; Portrait by Eamonn McCabe.
The Guardian G2: Monday 30^th. of April, 2007.

Do you dress like this every day?
Pretty much, with seasonal and circumstantial variation. I suppose this is my formal dress. I'm preparing to teach at embassies and corporate clients where they appreciate someone looking like their idea of how Englishmen used to look.

Describe your style
Classical and traditional. English with some European influences.

What breed is your dog?
Boyarin is a Russian wolfhound. He tends to get referred to as "the Boy". People say we look alike. I'm very conscious of him. Sometimes I go out and realise I'm all in whites, creams and tans and people say, "Oh, you've dressed to match your dog," but it's just an aesthetic response.

Where do you buy your clothes from?
Some are collected and some are inherited, but mostly they've been collected over the past three decades. My boots were handmade in Northamptonshire. My shirt was tailored for me by a costumier who used to make shirts for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The velvet jacket was made by a tailor who was interested in period costume and offered to make me something. If something is wearing threadbare I replace it but using old patterns. My style hasn't really changed - I haven't shaved or had my hair cut short for 30 years. There are things that I had made when I was 18 that fit me perfectly well.

How do you keep so slim?
It's partly genetic, and partly constitutional. I eat an organic vegan diet and at the age of 21 I sold my bike and began to walk everywhere. In the first month I dropped a stone. I am 51 and since I was 21 I've weighed 10 stone.

Why do you dress this way?
I've always dressed entirely to please myself. People have asked whether it is to draw attention to myself, but it's just that this feels right. At school I felt increasingly and acutely uncomfortable and out of place in contemporary clothing. I found myself increasingly confronted with a choice between being true to other people and their expectations, and in so doing suppressing myself, or allowing my own individuality to be expressed, and therefore diverging from the norm. In the end, there was no choice because I could not not be I. It was a life choice as well as a dress choice. I've never regretted it.

Do you have a historical style icon?
I don't think so but I have outfits from Shakespeare's time (I do Shakespeare look-alike work) and they run from the late 16th century to the Edwardian era. For me style stops after the first world war. There was a fellow called Comte Robert de Montesquiou in fin de siècle Paris who is the subject of the book Against Nature - people tell me I'm the spitting image of him.

Do you ever wear anything modern?
No, but my mobile phone is probably one of my few concessions to modernity. I've not watched television since 1974.

How is this outfit impractical for modern living?
My grandfather had his motor cars made especially to accommodate a silk top hat, because a gentleman did not remove his hat on entering his carriage. The roof was made to accommodate a long-backed man in an Edwardian bell topper. I don't need to remove it in London cabs, and the underground is generally accommodating. However, I do think it is impractical to keep a Russian wolfhound and take him everywhere.

Tell me about how people react to your look
Well, for example, one night in my own home town in the west country, I was walking by the river with the Boy in a full-length black cloak and a deep fur hat. A police car came towards me and stopped. Winding down the window, the driver leaned out and said, "So it's true. We're new on this beat and we were told we would see a tall figure with a large white hound, and that even though it looks like a ghost, it isn't. It's a chap who lives here and he's perfectly safe and normal, but lots of people who see him will telephone to report that they've seen a ghost."

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