Pick up something made in America between the late forties and the late fifties and the first thing you notice is that somebody made a decision. The collar has a roll to it. The trouser sits at the natural waist because that is where a waist is. The seams are finished on the inside, where nobody was ever going to look.

None of that was luxury. That was the floor. It was simply how clothes were made before it became cheaper to make them another way.

The same decade gave us the starburst, the tailfin and the neon sign on the road out of town. It was a country convinced the future was arriving on schedule, and it dressed like it. That optimism is the part people usually miss when they borrow from the era — they take the shapes and leave the confidence behind.

We are not interested in the costume. We are interested in the cut.

There is a version of this that ends up as fancy dress: the bowling shirt, the pomade, the wink at the camera. It photographs well and it wears badly, because nobody wants to be in character all day.

Johnny Booth takes the other road. Period patterns, period proportions, and nothing else borrowed. A jacket you could wear to a wedding, a garage or a supermarket without any of the three being a joke.

Every piece starts from a period pattern — the proportions the clothes were actually cut to at the time, not a modern shape with a vintage label stitched on. We choose cloth with enough weight to hold that shape and to soften the way good cotton and wool are supposed to, the more you wear them.

We would rather carry fewer things and stand behind each one than fill a catalogue. If a piece doesn't pass the test we set ourselves — would we wear it to a wedding, a garage and a supermarket without any of the three being a joke — it doesn't go up for sale. That's the whole rule, and it decides everything we make.