It's time for yet another helping of 1980s ephemera courtesy of Marks & Spencer in the form of their St Michael Brand. What can I say? St Michael was simply ubiquitous in Britain's relatively recent yet also distant past. Today, it's a rather fetching dressing gown we're looking at, and slipping into it feels like tuning a television to four channels and waiting for Channel 4 to start up.
It's a simplistic design, navy with burgundy trims, yet its unadorned simplicity also gives it an oddly timeless feel, a robe which refuses to be embarrassed by the decades. It's a solid 40 years old, manufactured in July 1985, a fact derived from the 075 code on the back of the size label. Talking of the label, it's the classic St Michaels logo which decorated not just a million items of clothing in the 1980s, but countless other household goods as well.
The gown itself is made from a mixture of 86% Triacetate and 14% Nylon, so it's 100% synthetic and this goes some way towards explaining its immortality. It's also incredibly lightweight and, purchased back at the start of June, I had intended for it to be my summer dressing gown, but the season betrayed me with so many heatwaves that I spent most mornings just sitting about in my underwear (which isn't vintage, but I'm working on it).
Now the mornings are cooling, the gown is back in service. I pad about, a 1985 man in 2025, pleased with my £12 investment on Vinted, a sum which is about one-quarter that of a modern M&S gown. And, of course, there's the sense of achievement that this vintage artefact grants me. This is how men across Britain once began their days: in synthetics, coffee in hand, in a robe that knew its place. And there’s something rather lovely about following in their quietly shuffling footsteps.
Nice! I have a dressing gown from Asda, bought purely for the fact that is almost identical to Arthur Dent's gown, as worn in the 80's tv adaptation of Hitchhikers Guide. (I may have bought two, the other being kept for when one becomes threadbare!)
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