Made too Much

Mass production has logic and motive. The logic is volume, the motive profit.

The whole point of mass production is the low cost per unit — but you only reach that low cost by making a great many units. So a great many get made. Far more, as a rule, than anyone has agreed to, or will ever buy.

That is the quiet scandal of the trade: clothes made before they are wanted, in quantities no one can be certain of selling. What doesn't sell is marked down, then marked down again, and much of it is never sold at all. It is landfilled or burned. Many of the garments were waste from the moment they were cut, because they were never going to be worn.

Then there is the cloth. Stack up fabric dozens of layers deep and a machine cuts through them all at once. The cloth between the pieces is swept up and binned. In a system built for speed and standardisation, there is no room to do anything else with it.

And because the saving in mass production is mostly the cost of the people who make the thing, most of it is made far away, where labour is cheap (almost certainly too cheap). A few things are traded away for the profit that generates — jobs and skills here, the quality produced there … and perhaps a bit of moral doubt.

We work the other way round, by necessity and by conviction. We make in small runs and make to order and buy our cloth in short lengths — our bouclés and brocades in very limited runs — so we are not making garments no one has asked for. We cut by hand and keep what others would throw away; we take our offcuts to other small British makers, who give them a new life — as bags and hangers, hairbands and lavender bags. And we make here in Britain, by hand, so nothing is given away in the making.

It is slower, and dearer per garment. It is also the only way we know to make a garment worth keeping — and to make far less that isn't.

Restrained, Considered, Elegant. True luxury, properly made.