This looks like a fun shirt!

There is a strong work connection to these Hawaiian shirts because of my early work as a film commissioner I travelled to America a lot. I wore this shirt while over in America trying to persuade directors to come to Wales to film. It was my way of trying to fit in with the crew. I had a pair of white trousers, sandals and sunglasses that I would wear with the shirt. The sunglasses were an essential part of the outfit! In fact I think it was trendier to wear them on your head than in front of your eyes! I bought two of these shirts in Burtons years ago and I think that they fit in rather well in America. That’s how it started, but then it even became a joke for some of the Americans, that I wanted to be just like them – it just snowballed from there! I also wore this shirt on my honeymoon in Las Vegas, and of course everyone wore them there and so I felt quite at home!

If you wore the clothes to fit-in in America, did they have the opposite affect over here?

I think that within the regimented ways of local authority that people look down their noses at someone like me, but saying that, there was kind of an acceptance that Hugh was working in a creative field away from central government. And so I think that I was accepted as being a little different- in a round peg in a square hole kind of way!

This is a very unique outfit.

I have a lot of clothes that are associated with different countries that I’ve visited. This is from the film industry as I went on a tour of India and to Bollywood to watch them film. I was over there visiting a Bollywood director and he took me to their equivalent of Marks and Spencer there and bought a few shirts for me including this one. He wanted me to wear this for a party he was throwing that night where he’s 80 something year old mother was going to come down from the mountains to meet the man from Wales who helped her son to make a film!

Do you get the chance to wear it over here?

I wear it on a Sunday night after a bath! But I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to wear it next year when I go on holiday to Goa in India.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Welshman in one of these before!

I bought this on holiday in Egypt when we went to Cairo. Every time I put it on my mind goes back to the shop in Cairo with hundreds of people everywhere and the man sitting me down offering it to me at an obscenely high price before we both bantered down to an agreeable sum. And then me buying something that I actually hadn’t intended to buy! But I think that now I can wear it and enjoy wearing it. It’s also a gateway to someone’s memories, reminding someone of events that they’ve experienced in the past that maybe they’ve forgotten.