Once upon a time, all distilleries were small.

Whether they made whisky or gin, the two spirits traditionally distilled in the UK, the scale of these historic operations was modest, in many cases domestic.  Distilling was carried out at home as a means of preserving fruit, preparing simple medicines and, of course, supplying alcohol for drinking.

Then came legislation, increased technology and consolidation in the distilling industry: small-scale craft distilling was relegated to the pages of the history books.

But now, as we look for more authentic, artisanal and individual products, it’s making a comeback. Some enterprising new distillers have sprung up to re-create a traditional approach to an essentially simple process and their products have been enthusiastically embraced by cocktail mixologists and discerning drinkers.

The trend back to small-scale distilling started in Scotland, where the idea of making your own whisky on the farm had not been entirely forgotten. On Islay, the most famous whisky island in the world, Anthony Wills converted derelict farm buildings to create the Kilchoman distillery.

Now his first whiskies have waited the regulation three years in oak barrels, he’s releasing his single malt and watching it walk out of the door at an impressive rate. Supplies are now on allocation and collectors are paying two and three times the launch price for a bottle of his Inaugural Release.

Others soon followed – the Red River (or Abhainn Dearg) distillery on the remote island of Lewis in the Hebrides and the Daftmill distillery in Fife. This latter is particularly interesting as the Cuthbert family who farm here have been able to finance the construction, fit-out and initial production themselves and are therefore keeping their whisky until it is fully matured before releasing it to an expectant market.

Farming was traditionally where much distilling was carried on and, with Norfolk a prime barley growing area, it’s not entirely surprising to find England’s first whisky distillery in over one hundred years at Roudham where Andrew Nelstrop is producing at the St George’s distillery. Alarmed Scots should note that the stills and the first distiller came from Scotland.

But it’s not necessary to have a farm to run a distillery. Gin was traditionally the spirit of England and, in the eighteenth century, much (of dubious quality) was produced on a very small scale, leading to gin’s questionable reputation.

Today, several boutique distillers have opened their doors in London including  Sipsmith’s in Hammersmith, where small batches of gin and vodka are made, and perhaps the most unusual new entrant, Sacred Spirits Company of Highgate. Everything here is truly home-made.

There Ian Hart, a former head-hunter, is distilling gin and vodka to recipes dating back to 1660 but using an ultra-modern low temperature vacuum distillation method to keep the essential botanicals (the flavour ingredients) super fresh, lush, creamy and aromatic.

So, if you want to start your own distillery, don’t despair. These pioneers prove that it is possible and that an eager crowd may even beat a path to your door. Just don’t forget to tell the taxman what you’re up to.

Ian Buxton

‘We’ve just launched our very own tweed,’ says Niels van Rooyen, the jocular and ruddy creative director of Holland and Holland. ‘It was in the archive from 1830 and we’ve dusted it off and had it woven again by factories right here in the UK,’ he explains, beaming like a prowling Cheshire cat.

He’s pointing at a subdued beige and brown fine tweed, a little like a puppy tooth check with a subtle purple windowpane check running across it.

Van Rooyen is talking me through the men’s winter collection, the core Holland and Holland kit (70% of its customers are men). This is essentially tough, practical and classic all weather gear for the shooting set. These sports are the brand’s DNA, but for a while a few years ago H&H re-pitched itself as a luxury lifestyle brand, a kind of English Hermès but with hunting rifles instead of saddlery. It was always an uneasy fit.

This move alienated the regular country set that had always bought their shooting gear from H&H, and it didn’t drive the sales to justify the changes. Van Rooyen left the brand during this difficult time, returning in glory three years later once the flirtation with fashion and luxury had faded from the house like an expensive exotic odor.

Yet, Van Rooyen isn’t one to miss the opportunity of pushing his product towards the young or newly rich that are making their first strides towards country pursuits. ‘I’m amazed by the popularity of trousers,’ he says with just the faintest twang of his South African roots and sounding ever-so slightly bonkers. ‘I think it’s the younger Royals, they’re less inclined to wear the cropped trousers and shooting socks that the Prince of Wales prefers.’ In Holland and Holland’s world, this is obviously a seismic shift of taste, decorum and etiquette.

In this collection there’s a navy blazer with silvered-gun cartridge buttons in a crease-resistant super-150 wool that would perfectly suit a formal dinner after a shoot. This is about as ‘fashion’ as the collection gets. And the necessary direction for the brand, explains Van Rooyen, seeing Holland and Holland as exclusively a shooting lifestyle company which produces ties, cashmere shirts, knitwear and their famous shooting socks (‘knitted with four needles by about 75 women in the north of England’) in an assortment of candy bright colours.

Loden, twill, corduroy, recoil pads (in leather to protect your shoulders from the gun’s kickback), shooting vests and tweed make up the lexicon of Holland and Holland’s unique offering. It’s a world of stiff upper lips, stout boots and making no fuss over driving rain, freezing fog or not getting a full brace of grouse on your first day’s shoot. It’s the world of the English upper classes at their most thrusting, sturdy and vaguely absurd. The hide-bound world of Jeeves and Wooster, nanny and croquet feels only a paneled morning room away.

Which is all, of course, reassuring. The world may be going to the dogs, but the good folk at Holland and Holland are still making their ingenious ‘Fitwell’ shooting jackets – the distinctive double pleat over each shoulder with just enough give to raise your double bore shotgun. Which does make one feely a teensy bit sorry for the poor little grouse.

Holland and Holland

31-33 Bruton Street
, 020 7499 4411

Is that him? – the question many guests were asking at last week’s private view of Maison Margiela’s work over the last 20 years. A near impossible question to answer as the Belgian iconoclast, known for his designs where the inner workings of a garment are as likely to be on the outside as hidden, is notoriously shy. Elusive even. Margiela never gave an interview or stood in front of a camera – he left the creative helm of the brand in 2008. The label lives on without him.

There have often been rumours that Margiela may not have been a man at all but rather a collective, a group of design talent that created ‘him’ as a name to design behind – a simulacrum of a real fashion person. It’s a bit like the pop group Gorillaz, but without knowing who the band members are at all.

The exhibition avoids a chronological approach. Rather, it groups clothes together around ideas or concepts. So there are flat garments that are only given shape when they’re worn, trompe l’oeil effects – garments printed with photos of themselves onto the fabric (a photograph of a shirt onto a shirt, for instance) and painted clothes. These feature white paint, a kind of signature of the brand, painted onto them. This desecration often happens to Margiela’s shoes too. Interiors of the company’s shops and much of the furniture inside is treated in the same way. Then it’s left. The decay of white paint is a conceptual device to show the demise of purity. Perhaps. Or maybe it’s an eco-point: look how grubby the city is!

According to the exhibition’s programme however, “the layer of white paint creates the illusion of a neutral canvas, as if the Maison wanted to establish its own tabula rasa with history,” a quote so full of itself I bet it can even self-email direct to Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner. It also reveals how seriously this brand takes itself. These are high-concept clothes for creative folk who see themselves in equally conceptual terms. Sexy doesn’t come into it.

The most intriguing line produced by the Maison is the ‘Replicas’. They take an original vintage garment, copy it faithfully, insert a label stating the item’s style, provenance and original date and leave off the Maison Martin Margiela label. This is because the brand no longer sees itself as the garment’s ‘author’. So a replica of a doctor’s coat from the Spring Summer 2005 collection for instance says that it’s a copy of one from 1920 from France. This baffling conundrum of ‘authorship’ feels more like sub-plot of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose than a commercially produced collection of clothing. It’s also pretty amusing.

“I spent a whole day with Margiela once,” said Sarah Mower, of Style.com looking out over the river on the terrace of Somerset House after the show. So he does exist then? “Oh yes, in fact Phoebe Philo at Celine has taken a number of his designers to work with her there since Margiela has now left his own label.” Which got me thinking. Could Phoebe Philo have been Martin Margiela all along? Now that really would be conceptual.

LV’s Bond Street  ‘Maison’ opens to the public today. David Waters gets a early doors access and a head rush from all the shiny bright things to see.

Did Health and Safety officers really sign off the vertiginous marble, brass, mirror and light-boxed staircase that links the three floors of Louis Vuitton’s newest, most lavish and high-tech shop? For it’s a precarious assault course for any biped without a head for heights. With 23 square meters of banded light-box, steel and stone panels I wasn’t sure if I was on a flat surface or needing to take a step up or down. A Perspex escalator would have felt like solid ground.

A deliberate disorientation by the store’s leather-capped architect Peter Marino? Shoppers will feel so relieved on reaching their destination they’ll be more than happy to lay down £999 on a monogrammed ‘Keepall’ weekend bag if they arrive in one piece. This kind of purchase needs to fly off these shelves many times an hour to make this lavishly bedecked store pay. No doubt it will. Then the customer will have something soft, squidgy and expensive to land on if they take a tumble back on the vertiginous stairs.

This is a titan of a store, the Vuitton’s most luxurious. Maison, excuse me. It is made from Aniegre wood, Corian, French embossed leather, Afromosia wood, French Lacquer, Portland stone, glass and engineered high-gloss wood veneer. Custom-made is the starting point for rugs, shot silk and leather chairs and sofas, and hand-beaten metal tables at odd angles look tipsily in on the menswear floor. There are also ceiling-suspended rotating planets made from glass and plastic, and the sunglass area has a ‘central oculous’ like a Big Brother all-seeing eye, but way more chic. As Marino says, “Some shops are just lethally serious. But we want people to smile.”

I know Louis Vuitton’s schtick is travel, but with this store they actually manage to take you off the planet entirely to a universe far, far away. It’s a mighty achievement for the luxury French leather good manufacturer that first opened a shop in London 125 years ago. And in keeping with the 11%, global economy-defying profits LVMH posted over the past year.

Of course all this conspicuous, open-to-anyone access of these first three floors might feel a little too democratic, or even dangerous to some of the brand’s discreet, famous or fearful customers. These special customers will be whisked to the ‘Apartment’ – an open plan space on the 2nd floor that is sectioned off into private shopping suites, each decked with fireplaces, antique and vintage furniture. Access is via a private lift.

The LV Maison is a sort of art gallery too. ‘Kiki’ a sculpture by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami who has worked closely with the brand, producing that candy-bright monogram, greets shoppers on the ground floor. Works by Richard Prince, another favourite of creative director Marc Jacobs, are also featured throughout the store. Downstairs look out for ‘Paws’, a wall-sized work by Gilbert and George in the menswear department.

Sadly, the most fun piece of art on display, Michael Landy’s Credit Card Destroying Machine, will be moved to a new home shortly. It was placed at the bottom of the stairs for the opening launch party. This well-named work – a Heath Robinson-esque machine of stuck on grotesquerie, fright masks, doll faces and severed limbs, bells and whistles – also scribbles abstractions onto pieces of A4 paper. Of course, it has to be moved. As all the credit card destroying – or, indeed, melting – will now be managed in-house by Louis Vuitton itself.

Louis Vuitton Maison, 160 New Bond Street , London W1

Humour and playfulness aren’t often associated with the leading edge in men’s fashion. It’s usually menswear’s seriousness. Or even a certain kind of pretention that believes a new trouser shape is capable of world peace, or may save lives. Menswear’s intellectual apologists weigh cult brands down with a gravitas they can never really match. This is, of course, fashion with a chip on its – laser cut – shoulder.

Which is why Lanvin’s clothes for men are such a blessed relief. Under the direction of Israeli fashion star Alber Elbaz, menswear designer Lucas Ossendrijver has been turning out the most covetable, easy-to-wear yet striking menswear around since his first winter 2006 collection. ‘I am not designing for fashion victims,’ he says, ‘but for fashion lovers’.

These are clothes to give pleasure; they don’t have world-saving agendas.

The recent trends for floppy bow ties, soft tailoring, shiny fabrics in green, plum and mustard set off by round, thick-framed specs are all thanks to Ossendrijver’s collections at Lanvin. It’s as if he has grabbed a buttoned up, strictly tailored Dior Homme model, splashed him with colours from a Farrow and Ball colour chart, buffed him to a sheen and stretched his suit to pyjama-like proportions. He’s then shod in a nifty pair of burgundy suede patent-toed trainers with thick white rubber soles, giving our floppy dandy the most comfortable feet in fashion. Happy days!

‘It’s not an intellectual thing,’ says Ossendrijver about his most recent A/W 10 collection, ‘but rather we see our studio as a laboratory where we research exclusive materials with different finishes and textures.’  This resulted in laser-cut seams on coats made from boiled wool mixed with silk, zip-off sleeved leather jackets, perfectly proportioned trench coats and the slimmest cut trousers, all worn with a backpack big enough for a week climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro. It’s these almost cartoonish proportions that give wit to the collections while sticking a welcome pin into the excesses of chin-scratching seriousness.

Ossendrijver’s trick is to take as his starting point perfectly conventional menswear, indeed conservative pieces with his insistence on suits, ties, bow ties and buttoned-up shirts. But then to execute them with subtle detail that makes the collections fly. Silk ties, for instance, are unstructured, so they end up more like a casual scarf than a piece of formal business wear. Similarly with Lanvin’s now-famous bow ties – they seem hand knotted and floppy, as if they were tied in a hurry as you dashed out your front door. It’s classic menswear imagined by an anarchically creative teenager with a mortal fear of being restricted by his clothes.

Models in the summer ’10 show were given drawn-on moustaches, a typical Lanvin touch. And the windows of the boutique on Savile Row are artfully messy – more arresting for their studied chaos than their chic good taste. Little surprise then that designer Tom Brown, king of the exaggerated, shrunken proportion should be on the front row of Lanvin’s A/W 10 show. As Ossendrijver might say, ‘bring on the clowns!’

Lanvin, 32 Savile Row, W1 020 7434 3384

Not for Keith Haring the snobbery and obsession with money found in the art market in 1980s New York. An obsession, indeed, that is even more rampant today. Haring’s art – linear graphics celebrating leaping, dancing human figures, dogs, babies, snakes and anything else that could be rendered in a sinuous black line – turned up on subway station walls, street corners, badges and extremely large pieces of paper. Haring took art to people even when those people were on the street busily trying to head elsewhere.

Which makes the collaboration between Tommy Hilfiger and the Keith Haring Foundation a neat marriage. The artist’s figures and buzzing hieroglyphs are emblazoned onto trainers and boots – so you pull the art onto your feet and then hit the street in them, making them far away from the refined world of the gallery and pristine white walls.

Both Tommy Hilfiger and the Keith Haring Foundation help youngsters through education and support for those affected by AIDS. Both these foundations are linked by developing these trainers.

Haring’s tragically short life – he died at 32 in 1990 of AIDS – was full of a prodigious creativity and an intense work schedule, making his art some of the most recognised and loved of the past thirty years. The exuberance and child-like charm of his work is life affirming, like a vertical plunge on a roller coaster with you hands thrust in the air. And, of course, trainers are just the right footwear to be leaping through life in.

As Haring himself said, “I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible, with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached.” He wrote these words in 1978 when he first arrived in New York. Which if you change the word art to fashion, works as a manifesto for how we dress today.

The higher top ankle boots are the style cognoscenti’s choice this summer and I’ll be wearing the ones in bright blue. If you’re going to wear a cult artist’s designs on your feet then why be shy by hiding them in black or grey?

Men’s trainers from £89.99 exclusively at Dover Street Market from May 7