Prince Charles, the accidental style icon

There was something so endearing about the Prince of Wales's patched-up gardening coat on Countryfile last night. The heir to the throne, building hedges in his back garden, was a vision of rosy cheeked, woolly gloved, cuddly dad-dom - the kind of Sunday sartorial shambles familiar to so many.

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But don't be fooled. While the Prince's patched up coat (so patched up in fact, he confessed he could barely move in it) was a far cry from the kind of baggy tracksuit bottoms and tatty old hoodie that you might spot outside your own kitchen window on a Sunday afternoon. Charles was in fact rocking a shabby chic look par excellence.

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The landed gentry, so fond of make do and mend, have always had a way with stylish hand-me-downs. This is because it is crucial that the item being mended - in Charles' case an olive green wool hunting jacket - started life as a design classic. A hand-me-down £9.99 fleece from Uniqlo will simply never muster the elegant nonchalance of a much-loved timeless coat, hand-patched by one's housekeeper in a complimentary palette of rustic, leathery patches.

In this tradition, Charles's battered and weather-beaten jacket rather brought to mind the tumbledown grandeur of Richard E Grant's greatcoat in the film classic Withnail and I.

Richard E Grant (right) in Withnail & I

When conjuring the look of the starving, upper class student for his escape to Uncle Monty's, costume designer Andrea Galer invested a great deal of time into locating the perfect coat which would look like it had been passed down through the generations of Withnail's family. Teamed with his tatty trousers, scuffed shoes and generally dilapidated demeanour, the floor-sweeping, moth-eaten, military coat - so unfashionable for the time - should have made Withnail look like was a rough sleeper.

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Instead, there was something so perfectly put together about his elegant 'vintage' look, that combined with his haughty attitude and swagger, elevated the whole ensemble into a different sartorial league. Withnail remains a style icon 25 years on from his big screen debut, something which the Prince is going to have to get used to himself if he's going to insist on being so damn fashionable all the time.

When all's said and done, it doesn't matter if you're mucking about in a B&Q shed, or tending to your rambling estate, if you've got it, you've just got it.

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