The Rag and Bone Man

Back in the ’60s, the idea that you could tell a man’s worth by how well he knew his way around a golf course was so widespread that the first question the CIA asked job applicants was which club they’d use on the 13th tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton. (A seven-iron, obviously.)

The times have a changed. For London designers Rag and Bone, a more pressing question might be which club to use when hanging an Oxford cotton button-down shirt. (A Swilken five-iron should do it.) Using a hydraulic bottle jack, refitted with brass putters for levers, modern-day scavenger Paul Firbank decapitates old golf clubs and refashions them into one-of-a-kind coat hangers almost too striking to hide in your wardrobe. In so doing, he continues the tradition of the Dickensian metal scavengers, cloth pickers and bone grubbers of London’s past, scouring scrap yards, railway grease shops and thrift markets for reusable trash.

Just like his horse-drawn forbears, Firbank’s penchant for disused parts and scrap metal was born of economic necessity – it’s cheaper to tinker with existing materials than produce new ones. Luckily for him, stocks in repurposed machinery have risen slightly since the Victorian era, as has the public perception of recycling.

Published in Smith Journal, December 2013