Suits & Shirts · The Bond Wardrobe Files
On Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Only Film Bond Ever Wore a Kilt, and Almost Got Away With It
One actor, one film, one tailor change — and the closest James Bond ever came to dressing like a man of his own decade.
1969 was the year London stopped pretending the fifties had never ended. Miniskirts, kaftans, ruffled shirts on men who would have been arrested for less a decade earlier — and into that noise walked a new James Bond, played by an Australian model nobody had heard of, wearing clothes cut by a tailor nobody at Eon had used before. George Lazenby lasted exactly one film. Dimi Major, the tailor who dressed him, delivered what is still argued to be the single best-dressed Bond outing in the franchise's history.
That contradiction is the whole story of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It is a film that gets the tailoring almost perfectly right and the accessories occasionally, spectacularly wrong. A dinner suit that could walk into a Savile Row fitting room today without a single alteration, sitting three scenes away from a lace jabot that would, decades later, get mistaken for an Austin Powers costume. Bond had never been this fashionable, and he would rarely be this fashionable again.
The Rule: A New Tailor, Not a New Character
Dimi Major's task in 1969 was not to reinvent Bond. It was to update Anthony Sinclair's postwar silhouette without losing the discipline underneath it. He succeeded by changing exactly the details that needed changing and leaving everything else alone — which is, incidentally, the only correct way to modernise a classic wardrobe, on screen or off it.
Major's cut dropped the roped shoulder for a natural, unpadded line. He replaced Sinclair's pleated trousers with a flat, darted front. He introduced the button-three jacket for Bond's more traditional looks, alongside the button-two he kept for the sportier ones — a diversity Connery, loyal to two buttons throughout, never had. The waist came in noticeably tighter. Nothing about it reads as costume; it reads as a good tailor responding to how a 29-year-old athlete's body actually moves, which is precisely the brief.
The Dinner Suit: Bond's First Peaked Lapel in the Dark
Lazenby's introduction as Bond happens, like Connery's before him, in a dinner suit. It is a genuinely important garment in the franchise's history: the first time Bond wore a peaked lapel on a dark dinner jacket, having previously worn peaks only on an ivory dinner jacket. The midnight-blue wool, faced in silk satin on both the lapels and the cuffs, is cut trimmer than anything Connery wore — most visibly in the trousers — but it makes no other concession to fashion. It is, by every account, a dinner suit a London tailor could cut today without changing a stitch.
Where Frank Foster Took the Risk
The jacket stayed classic. The shirts underneath did not. Bond wears two Frank Foster dress shirts in voile cotton across the film's evening scenes — one with a pleated, lace-trimmed front, the other with a full ruffled front — both cut with the anatomically close fit that made Foster's work instantly recognisable next to Turnbull & Asser's fuller cuts for Connery. This is 1960s "peacock" styling, and it is the only film in the entire series where Bond dresses this way.
Whether those shirts have aged well is still argued fifty-plus years later. What is not argued is the fitting: a close, tailored dress shirt was nearly unheard of at the time, and Foster's work here is as much a technical achievement as the jacket surrounding it. The dinner suit lets the shirt carry the fashion risk while the tailoring itself stays timeless — which is, if you think about it, the correct division of labour for a man who still has to go to the office on Monday.
The Prince of Wales Check: The Suit Every Bond Fan Actually Wants
If there is one garment from this film worth commissioning today, it is the Prince of Wales check suit Bond wears to burgle a lawyer's office in Bern. The cloth is a medium-to-heavyweight worsted wool, somewhere in the 12 to 14 ounce range — considerably heavier than what most suitings run today, which is exactly why it holds its shape and drapes the way it does on screen.
The check itself updates the Glen Urquhart pattern Connery wore in From Russia With Love: black and white woven in an even twill, producing a houndstooth motif at the centre of each check, finished with a subtle blue overcheck that ties the whole suit to the pale blue shirt and navy knitted tie worn with it. Major went further than the fabric mill did — he rotated the cloth 180 degrees between adjoining panels, so the white stripe sits above on the lapels, the black stripe sits above on the chest, and the white returns on the sleeves. It is the kind of detail no customer ever asks for and every good cutter does anyway.
- Jacket: button-two, moderate lapel width at 9.5 cm, full chest, sharply waisted, flared skirt with closed forequarters.
- Pockets: steeply slanted hacking pockets with flaps, plus a ticket pocket — the only suit in the film to carry one.
- Vents: two long double vents, angled outward to emphasise the waist suppression.
- Buttons: dark horn, three to the cuff, deliberately sporting against the formality of the cloth.
- Trousers: flat, darted front, side-adjusters on a three-button Daks-top system — no belt required.
The shirt is Foster again, this time restrained: sky-blue cotton voile, narrow point collar, front placket, single-button rounded cuffs. The tie breaks from the expected silk for a navy wool knit, tied in a half-Windsor, and the shoes are black tassel-free slip-ons with a strap detail borrowed from monk styling. Nothing here is loud. It is simply correct, texture doing the work that pattern usually does.
The Hacking Jacket: Where the Tweed Wins and the Neckwear Loses
For the Portugal sequences — Draco's birthday party, riding with Tracy, the bullfight — Bond wears a three-button hacking jacket in thick brown tweed, patterned in houndstooth accented by a windowpane overcheck. It is bolder than Connery's barleycorn tweed and doubles as a direct nod to Fleming's literary Bond, who wears a houndstooth suit repeatedly in the novels. Notch lapels, a single vent, one-button cuffs — a jacket built with genuine equestrian intent, not costume-department guesswork.
Where the Outfit Overreaches
The jacket is worn with beige jodhpurs, black riding boots — and a stock collar shirt with a cream stock cravat instead of an ordinary tie. It fits the peacock and Edwardian-revival trends of late-1960s London, but on screen it tips into costume. Matt Spaiser at Bond Suits has argued, correctly, that a plain cream shirt with a red knitted tie would have kept the equestrian mood without making Bond look dressed for a part rather than a person.
It is worth sitting with why this matters. The jacket itself is superb tailoring — the kind of piece you could commission today in a heavier flannel and wear for a decade. The failure is entirely in the styling choice layered on top of it, and it is a useful lesson: a well-cut garment can still be undone by an accessory that answers a question nobody asked.
Willy Bogner's Sky-Blue Ski Suit
Lazenby became the first Bond to ski on screen, and Willy Bogner built him a two-piece suit in sky-blue stretch nylon — a Helanca-style wool-and-elastic blend by some accounts — cut to fit "like a glove" and cut the wind resistance a looser suit would have caught. The jacket ran hip-length with ribbed knit at the collar and cuffs, closed by a metal zip pull stamped with Bogner's own "B". The trouser tapered sharply at the ankle to slide into ski boots, with no visible pockets and a hidden hook closure at the waistband.
A Production Detail Worth Knowing
Director Peter Hunt chose the sky-blue specifically because it matched the blue screen used for effects work at the time — forcing the production to actually shoot in the Swiss Alps rather than take shortcuts in a studio. Lazenby, a strong skier in real life, still had Olympic-level stunt doubles handle the technical descents for insurance reasons.
Underneath, a white cotton knit polo-neck jumper for warmth without bulk; a navy wool bobble hat; white-framed ParaSki bug-eye goggles in amber with a houndstooth headband; black leather-lined gloves; and handmade Swiss ski boots by Molitor, tightened with cable and buckle. It remains one of the most genuinely iconic outfits Bond has ever worn on screen, and one of the very few that owes nothing to Savile Row at all.
Accessories That Stuck, and the One That Should Have Stayed in the Wardrobe Department
Two watch details from this film outlived it. Bond's Rolex Submariner (ref. 5513) is worn for the first time on a steel Oyster bracelet, replacing the leather and NATO straps Connery favoured — a change that has become so associated with the character that later films and continuity tributes still return to it. A "Pre-Daytona" chronograph (ref. 6238) appears at Piz Gloria. Night driving in the DBS calls for yellow-lensed Nighthawk glasses, designed to cut glare rather than look interesting, which they do anyway.
The Kilt, the Jabot, and Why It Still Gets Argued About
Bond's disguise as Sir Hilary Bray puts Lazenby in full Highland dress: a Prince Charlie coatee, a Black Watch tartan kilt, and a standing-collar shirt finished with a lace jabot. The outfit sits at the formality of black tie, but the jabot technically belongs to the white-tie register of Highland evening wear — a mismatch that was already slightly costume-like in 1969 and has, since 1997, been permanently associated with Austin Powers rather than Bond.
Had the jabot been swapped for an ordinary black bow tie, the whole look would have read as formalwear rather than fancy dress, and would likely be remembered today as one of the sharper disguises in the series rather than the one everyone brings up first.
The Aston Martin, Then and Fifty Years Later
Bond's olive-green Aston Martin DBS in this film earned a proper tribute in 2019: the Aston Martin DBS Superleggera "OHMSS Edition", a 50-unit run — one car for every year since the film's 1969 release — priced at £300,007 in the UK. Q by Aston Martin's customisation division repainted it in the original Olive Green, fitted a six-vane chrome grille echoing the 1969 car, and added gloss-black diamond-turned wheels with carbon-fibre aero details. "OHMSS" is engraved into the side strakes.
Inside, black leather meets grey Alcantara — the same combination as the original — with red stitching and accents throughout, a direct reference to the red-lined glovebox that hid Bond's only real gadget in the film: a detachable rifle with a telescopic sight. It is a rare case of a modern manufacturer understanding that the tribute belongs in the details, not in the badge.
Dimi Major only dressed Bond once, and he still produced some of the finest tailoring the character has ever worn. That is not an accident of one good year — it is what happens when a tailor understands that modernising a wardrobe means changing the cut, not the character.
The lesson for anyone building a wardrobe today sits in the contrast between the Prince of Wales suit and the stock-collar riding kit. One is confident restraint; the other is a costume trying to do a suit's job. The difference is rarely the tailor's hand — it is almost always the accessory layered on afterwards.
Buy the suit that still works in fifty years. Leave the jabot in the costume department.
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