13 minute read
GEARING UP
Interview by Dominic Bliss
Ex-Marine sniper, adventurer and all-round man of brawn Aldo Kane requires kit that has to meet an essential brief – to ensure his survival. He talks to Oracle Time about the apparel and equipment he depends on to see him through some of the harshest environments on earth
ALDO KANE owns three kilts and, like every good Scotsman, he never wears underpants beneath them. “There’s no excuse for underwear when you’re wearing a kilt. 100%,” he confirms.
For this adventurer and documentary-maker, tartan is for formal occasions. Aldo wore a handmade kilt with a tweed jacket for his wedding two years ago. But his profession rarely calls for formal wear. Not so much jacket and tie, as hiking boots, goose down jackets, wetsuits, helmets and climbing harnesses.
While many trades require a specialist uniform, Aldo’s work is so multi-faceted, with so many different specialisms and techniques, that his uniforms number in the dozens. During his career, he has served in Iraq as a Royal Marines sniper, abseiled into the crater of an active volcano, dived deep in the ocean, fended off a charging rhino, avoided drug cartel hit-men, and rowed across the Atlantic from Portugal to Venezuela.
Since he left the Royal Marines in 2003, he has worked as a safety adviser, logistics expert, and occasionally presenter, on ten or so different TV documentaries. The titles reveal the level of danger he regularly faces: Steve Backshall’s Extreme Mountain Challenge, Expedition Volcano, Volcano on Fire, Ed Stafford: First Man Out, Arctic: Frozen Frontier, Mexico: Maya Underworlds.
Most recently he returned from the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, where he was filming a National Geographic documentary. Here, at one point, he found himself diving beneath the ice in seawater temperatures of minus 1.5 degrees Celsius. “That’s as cold as you can physically dive in,” he explains.
The clothing and equipment required for that particular foray was more specialised than ever. With scuba or rebreather equipment on his back, he wore a Fourth Element dry-suit and diving gloves, on top of Canada Goose woolen undergarments. Other equipment included a diving computer, which warns him of his decompression debts and remaining oxygen, plus a Bremont S501 diving watch. When he’s not beneath the waves, he prefers a Bremont MBIII watch.
Given the range of hostile environments Aldo operates in, his wardrobe at home consists of a jumble of hard-core expedition equipment. “Bombproof” is how he describes much of it. “Before an expedition, I ask myself: ‘Is it going to be freezing cold; sandy and warm; wet and dark inside a cave?’,” he says. “That allows me to work out my expedition basics.”
For climbing trips there are ropes and harnesses; for sleeping in the jungle there’s a Hennessy hammock; the tents and sleeping bags are Mountain Hardware; the expedition rucksacks are Osprey.
For eating and drinking in the wild, he
finds certain items indispensable. He always carries a Yeti cup, an MSR coffee filter, and what he calls a “racing spoon”. “That’s Royal Marines slang for a spoon with a long handle that you can wolf down your food with. It means you can get into the bottom of your boil-in-thebag without getting your hands covered in spaghetti bolognese.”
Aldo and his fellow documentarymakers wouldn’t last long without clean drinking water. The solution is an MSR Guardian water purifier. “Filming in Surinam with Steve Backshall, we used it for six weeks, pumping river water through it. It’s expensive, but one of the best I’ve ever used. It’s effective against bacteria, particulates and some viruses. Having fresh water is an imperative.”
Hardwearing clothing is vital, too. For boots and climbing shoes, Aldo normally sports an Italian brand called La Sportiva. In the jungle he needs footwear that’s extra waterproof and opts for jungle boots from British brand Altberg. In the coldest environments (“In Siberia it can drop to minus 55 Celsius”) he wears triple-insulated boots. “However cold it gets, I never wear two pairs of socks,” he adds. “It doesn’t make your feet warmer. Much better to get a good fitting pair of boots with one sock which allows blood to circulate.”
Extreme cold also requires an extreme jacket in the form of a Canada Goose Snow Mantra. For trousers he wears Fjallraven. In warm weather he’ll wear Vollebak Planet Earth shirts, in colder weather he needs merino wool Canada Goose base layers. “I can wear my wool boxer shorts and under-layers for up to ten days and they never stink,” he says reassuringly.
If the world is divided into those who live like lambs and those who live like lions, then Aldo falls firmly into the latter category. Claws, teeth, mane... the lot. His life story – much of which, incidentally, he recounts in his new book Lessons From The Edge – reads like an old-fashioned Boys’ Own adventure.
Born in 1977 in the north Ayrshire town of Kilwinning to paramedic parents, he grew up alongside four other siblings, including his twin brother Ross. At the tender age of 16 he joined the Royal Marines. Thrown in at the deep end, he recalls his arrival at the Commando training centre in Lympstone, in Devon. “It was the first time I’d left home to do anything, and I remember getting off at the train station, thinking ‘What the hell have I done?’ The drill commander, with his stick, would just whack you in the balls.”
By 19 years old, he had trained as a sniper, serving first in Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s with 40 Commando, then in Iraq in 2003 with 42 Commando. Pressed on what life was like seen through the sights of a high-velocity
Aldo wears:
Bremont Supermarine S301 Nato Strap, £2,995. Available at bremont.com
LIGHTEN THE LOAD
On-the-road veteran Aldo Kane shares his wisdom for packing light when on the wing
1— The magic number
Pack in the rule of threes. Three boxer shorts, three pairs of socks, three T-shirts. That way you can wear one, wash one, and have one spare
2— Roll up, roll up
Roll up your clothes, don’t fold them, then stuff them tightly in your bag, it’s a huge space-saver
3— Dress up to fly
To really travel light, take just one jacket and wear it on the plane. A lightweight Gore-Tex jacket will keep you warm and protect you from downpours
Hardwearing clothing is vital to Aldo. He wears La Sportiva boots for climbing, Altberg boots for the jungle and triple insulated boots in the coldest environments. Whatever the weather though, he always brings his trusty Bremont S300 with him
rifle, he brushes over the thorny question of shooting enemy combatants. “Going to war, that’s pretty much what’s on the cards but not something that anyone wants to do,”.
Fear was a constant companion. “I remember not being able to sleep the night before I flew into battle,” he once wrote. “My mind raced, I could barely hold my hands straight and my stomach was in knots, but as anyone who has been to the front line will tell you, this is the excitement kicking in. What really makes you perform under extreme stress is how that excitement is used.”
Eventually Aldo faced the tricky transition back to civilian life. Floundering between several dissatisfying jobs, and constantly broke, it was a spell selling gas and electricity door to door that was the final straw. He remembers a customer slamming the front door in his face for the umpteenth time, when suddenly he lost the plot. Throwing his clipboard to the floor in disgust, he stripped off his uniform in the unimpressed customer’s driveway, and stormed off in a huff, wearing just his underwear. Some uniforms don’t suit this man, it seems.
It was as a climbing rope specialist that Aldo made his first foray into documentaries. In the early 2010s, he abseiled down into the crater of an active volcano in the Congo called Mount Nyiragongo. “I got all the way down to within 100 metres of the biggest lava lake on Earth,” he remembers. “The last 80 metres was one of the sketchiest abseils I’d ever done.”
Despite having gas monitors, the levels of carbon dioxide near the crater floor were off the scale, and he worried he’d pass out with no chance of climbing back up. “I started telling myself all the things that could go wrong. You don’t need rescuing from there because there is no option for rescue.”
Over the years, there have been many other brushes with death. The three times he and his team capsized while rowing across the Atlantic, for example. Or the rock fall that narrowly missed crushing him while climbing in Oman. Or the car crash in Mexico where a mass of steel slid off the roof of the vehicle behind, slamming through his rear
windscreen, just inches from his head.
A year ago, this adventurer became a father for the first time. Typically, he was away on one of his expeditions when his wife Anna gave birth back home in the UK. Committed to filming in the waters off the Dominican Republic, he had to witness his son Atlas’s arrival into the world via a Whatsapp video call from his ship. “That morning I’d been diving with humpback whales.”
Aldo, Anna and Atlas now live in Bristol. It’s a place where all that specialist clothing tends to be rather redundant. “I don’t need to come back home and hang around in expedition kit,” he says, realising how ridiculous that would look. “I do one of the most masculine, alpha-male jobs on the planet, but I don’t shout and bang a drum about it.”
So what does this new dad wear when he’s off duty? “I’m a jeans, Vans trainers and T-shirt kind of guy,” he says, happy to describe his look as “standard Dad clothing”.
And, on the rare occasions he’s required to dress up, one of the three kilts might come out of the wardrobe. But no underpants, naturally.
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Après mode
Your last play on fresh powder is probably a distant memory by now, so the time is ripe to get reacquainted with some long-awaited piste-side action. Here’s the kit to pack to get you through those post-slalom rounds in fine fashion
Edited by SHANE C. KURUP
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1/ Burlington Country Fair Isle socks £15, burlington.de 2/ E. Tautz Fair-Isle Wool Jumper £495, matchesfashion.com 3/ Montblanc 1858 Automatic 24H £2,635, montblanc.com 4/ Simini African Nut Simini Skis £960, bombinate.com 5/ Mackage Edward 2 in 1 down parka £1,250, mackage.com 6/ Vallon brown Glacier sunglasses £95, vallon.store 7/ New Balance + Snow Peak Tokyo Design Studio boots £250, mrporter.com 8/ Mr Marvis The Lakes Flannel Trousers £119, mrmarvis.co.uk 9/ Victorinox Touring “17 backpack £250, victorinox.com 10/ John Lewis ANYDAY Borg vest £45, johnlewis.com
Firm footing
Hiking boots have officially left high-altitude trials for the high-fashion arena. Strap on a pair of these sturdy clodhoppers for a hit of Edmund Hillary swagger without the hard ascent
Edited by SHANE C. KURUP
Edward Green Cranleigh shearling-lined boots £1,450 edwardgreen.com
GANT, St Grip lace-up boots £170, gant.co.uk
Crockett & Jones Ross Chocolate Hurricane Hide boots £500 crockettandjones.com Acne Studios flatform hiking boots £650, matchesfashion.com
Bally Hike White Boot £610, bally.co.uk
DAMP PROOFING
If your leather boots get wet, don’t expose them to heat – air-dry them with newspaper inside and then apply a good nourishing cream to keep the leather seasoned
Euan Denholm, Head of Brand at Edward Green
Manolo Blahnik Calaurio calf hair boots £1,075, manoloblahnik.com
New & Lingwood scotchgrain leather hiking boots £395, newandlingwood.com Moncler Peak pebble-grain leather hiking boots £595, mrporter.com
Danner Mountain Pass Mink Oil boots $370 (approx. £270), global.danner.com
ROA Andreas leather hiking boots £335, matchesfashion.com
Edited by SAM KESSLER
007
Style
DANIEL CRAIG’S MOST ICONIC BOND LOOKS AND HOW TO GET THEM
>>>> It’s almost here: the 25th James Bond film and Daniel Craig’s final outing as the world’s least secret agent. While initial reviews are yet to come in, the hype seems to have been building unabated, despite endless delays pushing it back to next month. That’s never a good sign but we’ll hold our judgement until we’ve sat through the longest Bond film ever ourselves.
No matter how it turns out though, there’s little doubt that Craig’s Bond has had a huge impact on men’s style. From his initial brooding foray in Casino Royale to the immense Skyfall and finally to No Time to Die (yes, we’re skipping the crap ones), 007 has consistently shown off impeccable taste, whether suited and booted or in a more off-duty look.
Here then are three of Craig’s most iconic and stylish 007 looks, and how you too can emulate Bond. James Bond.
The T-Shirt: Sunspel
>—> After reinventing their iconic polo for the film, Sunspel also decided to tailor their v-neck to Daniel Craig’s imposing physique, giving us the Riviera T-shirt. The two-fold, long-staple cotton is incredibly soft and perfect for transitioning between seasons, the kind of wardrobe staple that no man should be without. Here it makes the perfect underlayer for Craig’s canal louche look.
£75, sunspel.com
The Cardigan: John Smedley
>—> The Cullen cardigan is a dye-in-the-wool classic of British knitwear. Said wool is in fact a combination of cashmere and merino wool for comfort and breathability so that, even though it’s geared towards winter layering, it works to keep the chill Venetian wind off despite the warm weather. Add in a shawl neck for some old school flair, unbutton for a more casual drape and there you have it.
£335, johnsmedley.com
CASINO ROYALE –
Off-duty Venetian cool
>>> Craig’s first clandestine outing in 2006 was a new era for 007, a grittier, more thoughtful era, and one reflected in his clothes. Sure, there was still the occasional poker-ready tuxedo, but combined with a few more casual outfits tailored specifically to show off this new, more brutal Bond – such as this all-season ensemble on the canals of Venice.
