Walker Slater: New Heritage Series
Academia meets a nice hike in the Highlands
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of The Bell!
We’re having very British weather here in the Loire Valley this week, and as I sit down with a thrice-reheated cup of coffee, it feels like the perfect time to write about a favorite Scottish brand of mine, Walker Slater.
Walker Slater was introduced to me by my dad and brother more than a decade ago when they took a trip to Scotland. They brought home a burgundy wool cardigan and a Black Watch tartan cashmere scarf for me, both of which hold pride of place in my wardrobe to this day!
The Walker Slater raison d’être is tailoring. Specifically, tweed tailoring, for both men and women. But it’s so much more than that.
A youngish brand, Walker Slater was founded in 1989 in the Scottish Highlands before later moving the headquarters to Edinburgh’s Old Town (the boutique my dad and brother visited and where I later visited and shopped in 2022). The brand now has shops in Glasgow and London, and is planning expansion to Japan.
Established by Frances Slater and Paul Walker, the company started out supplying remote communities with hard-wearing classic clothing to combat the harsh elements. Now, the company’s mission is to champion the heritage and sustainability of tweed and woolen fabrics through contemporary and elegant clothing.
This brand also embraces a whimsy that you don’t always see with tailoring—when you step into one of their stores, you enter a playful world that’s somehow both nostalgic and entirely contemporary.
Most of the tailoring products are ready-to-wear, but you can also work with them for made-to-measure pieces. They round out the quintessential Scottish wardrobe with outerwear, shirts, knitwear, silk accessories, and more for men and women. Overall, quality reigns supreme, and with WS’s timeless approach to understated design and deeply-rooted appreciation for fabrics that are sustainably made, their creations are crafted to last.
On the note of sustainability, that extends to local Scottish economies. A fundamental area of the business is working in close proximity with its range of suppliers and mills, most notably the world-renowned Harris Tweed Hebrides. Over the last three decades, Walker Slater has worked season on season with Harris Tweed to create a myriad exclusive fabrics. In addition to that, it also supports and promotes the lesser-known mills in The Borders, as well as specialist mills in Italy and beyond.
Walker Slater has proudly created garments for Scotland’s national football (soccer) and rugby teams, as well as uniforms for esteemed hotels across the UK and Europe.
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I need to also mention a very important piece on pricing! Walker Slater is committed to high quality at as low of a cost as possible to the customer.
You can buy a women’s Harris Tweed trench-style overcoat for £525, or about $700. A comparable coat at another small British tailoring brand comes in over $1,100.
You can see the cost savings in the website: most items aren’t photographed on models and the online merchandising in general is bare bones. I noted in my own items I’ve purchased there that the linings are poly.
All of that is actually fine with me; I think Walker Slater strikes a beautiful balance of price and quality, and some sacrifices have to be made to pull that off and make such lovely tailoring available to a wider audience.
Let me know what you think—did you know this brand before? Will you be shopping there now that you do?
Talk to you Friday with this week’s recs!
xx Jane