Material Matters

Mass production doesn't just standardise sizes — it standardises cloth as well.

To make at scale, you settle on one fabric (and one colour, maybe two), buy it in huge quantities, and put the same thing on everyone.

"This season's colour" is the polite name for it — a single shade, chosen for you and quietly retired a few months later so the next can take its place. It suits the producers admirably: one cloth to buy, one colour to push, and a built-in reason for you to come back for the next. Whether the cloth is good, and whether its colour suits you, are beside the point. Which raises the question the system would rather you didn't ask: do you actually want to look like everyone else?

We don't think you do — and we think the cloth is where it starts. We pay as much attention to fabric as to form. Our tweeds and flannels are British, mostly sourced directly from the mills that make them. Our bouclés are purchased deliberately, in very short runs from Carlisle; our brocades woven for us in Suffolk. Our silks we will source in the colours you choose. Order a coat from us and you have a fair guarantee it won't be one of many. That isn't a luxury we tacked on; it is the whole point of making the way we do.

There is an injustice worth naming, too. A man who wants a suit can walk into a tailor on Savile Row and choose from hundreds of cloths — weights, weaves, colours, whole books of them. A woman, a few streets away on Bond Street, is handed this season's two or three: take it or leave it. The choice a man takes for granted in his tailoring has simply never been extended to her. We think it should be.

So consider your cloth. It is the part of a garment that does the most and is thought about least. Choose it for yourself, rather than for the season, and you will already look unlike the crowd — before a single stitch is sewn.