Oliver Spencer’s devotion to stunning clerical fabrics finds divine expression with Favourbrook’s AW25 Menswear Collection
It’s not every stylish man that would take their sartorial cues from the more flamboyant vestments worn by the clergy. But Oliver Spencer, founder of occasionwear brand Favourbrook – which has just launched its autumn/winter 2025 menswear collection – is cut, so to speak, from a different cloth.
The stoles and birettas in lavish fabrics and vibrant hues that grace Britain’s pulpits each Sunday have proved the inspiration, over the years, behind what is surely one of Britain’s most creatively uninhibited clothing brands.
‘The colours, the gold thread, the regalness of it all – I just love it, and love how it just works so well for a waistcoat,’ Spencer tells Brummell. ‘I first came across it when I was at art school, and I was selling second-hand clothing in Portobello Road on Fridays and Saturdays. My dad – who had a really fantastic, classical kind of wardrobe – knew someone at a silk weaving mill in Suffolk called Stephen Walters and put me in touch.
The cloth had extra runs in them where the yarn gets caught, and this guy who owned the factory said, “Well, you’re a young man, can you do anything with this?” So I turned up with my waistcoat pattern, and looked into whether I could fit it in between the damages and the cloth – and it turned out I could.”
This stroke of serendipity has left an indelible mark on British sartorial culture. Favourbrook, founded by Spencer along with Marina Wallrock and Peter Vainer in 1993 – ‘as a formalwear brand for those with a passion for interesting fabrics’, as he puts it – provided much of the wardrobe for Four Weddings and a Funeral, and counts Ronnie Wood and Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page among its clients.
Favourbrook Autumn-Winter 2025
It has been an official menswear licensee for Royal Ascot since 2019, the year following that in which it moved its operations from Mayfair’s Piccadilly Arcade to a premises in Pall Mall where it is flanked by a country pursuits boutique and a gallery specialising in British art.
So, it rings true when Spencer describes Favourbrook’s aesthetic as ‘very English’: and the new autumn/winter menswear collection turns the Blighty-flavoured flamboyance up to 11. Expect frill dress shirts in ivory and muted pink poplin fabrics, along with plenty of velvet in fawn, sapphire blue and bottle green, combining to infuse traditional black-tie dressing with a more than generous dash of decadence. Corduroy suits in moss green, olive, pink and navy meanwhile give voice to Spencer’s assertion that Favourbrook’s autumn/winter 2025 collection should ‘empower the modern man’.
Sartorial flexibility, he tells Brummell, was a core aim with the autumn/winter 2025 collection. ‘The pink frilled dress shirt has depths of colour, and the frills are a flamboyant gesture, which can either be dressed up or understated,’ he says. ‘You can open up all the buttons, or you can wear a bow tie with them and look very kind-of David Niven, which I love. I’ve also reengaged with a logo that we hadn’t used for a long time – our bumblebee. I’ve used it in our embroidery, and put it into jackets, waistcoats and trousers, particularly in velvet.’
Ultimately, Spencer says, his aim with Favourbrook is to provide a ‘twisted version of tradition’. If his other, eponymous, brand founded in 2002 is that quietly charismatic soul who commands a room’s attention without ever raising their voice, Favourbrook is the unabashed raconteur in the other corner.
‘We dress people for special occasions – for times in their life, or in other people’s lives, where they want to be dressed up and feel good about themselves and be dressed in a more formal, more unusual, way,’ he says. ‘I think people want to dress up and party harder at the moment. It improves people’s spirits.’
