# NIGEL CABOURN FW26: ซีซันแรกที่ Onion

**By Onion** · 2026-11-11

## A Doctor's Shirt, On a Mountain Nobody Remembers Him For

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One shirt in this drop takes its pattern from a shirt worn by the doctor on a British mountaineering expedition. Not the climber who reached the summit. The man who went along to look after everyone else. The shoulders and arms are doubled, there are ventilation eyelets at the back and sides, and the buttons are a cat's eye shape. Nobody keeps detail at that level without having the original in his hands.

That is how Nigel Cabourn worked, and Fall/Winter 2026 is the first delivery to reach the shop.

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Nigel Cabourn studied design at Northumbria, in the north of England, between 1967 and 1971, and started his own label in his final year at university. The story told most often is that at some point in the 1970s Paul Smith gave him an old RAF pilot's jacket. From that one garment he began collecting, and never stopped. The studio in Jesmond, Newcastle, holds over four thousand old garments and almost three thousand books, mostly military uniform, expedition kit and twentieth century workwear. He did not design from imagination. He designed from the thing he was holding.

The Army Cargo Pant here explains the method better than anything else in the drop. The base is the US military M-51, with details pulled in from the M-43 and from old British Army issue. The more telling decision is the cloth. The pant that followed the M-51 was the M-65, which switched to a cotton-nylon blend because it lasted longer. This one stays on the 1951 side of that line and uses pure cotton, accepting that it will wear down slowly, because that is where the appeal he was chasing lives.

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> Getting an old garment right is not copying how it looked. It is accepting the limits of its era too: that is what Cabourn's work insists on.

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The first delivery runs from outerwear down to socks. An M42-derived field shirt pigment dyed so the colour moves with wear, a bag in Swiss Army canvas, a hemp beanie, and thick pile socks. Every piece is sewn in Japan.

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A garment researched before it was drawn already carries a story before you have put it on.

**Tags:** Archive, Feature, FW26, Made in Japan, Military, Nigel Cabourn

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> Source: [onionbkk.com / Onion](https://onionbkk.com/blogs/blog/nigel-cabourn-fw26)