The Coat Route

by Meg Lukens Noonan

  BENJAMIN HARRISON

  On an overcast fall morning in Paris, Frédéric Dormeuil, a thirty-year-old executive with his family’s luxury fabric business, is driving down the Avenue de New York and telling me a funny story about an experience he had with a Vietnamese tailor who tried to sell him counterfeit versions of his own Dormeuil cloth. This may not seem like the most amusing of topics, but in Frédéric’s hands it is a one-act play à deux: the plummy Englishman meets the hard-selling Hoi An shop owner. Just as he reaches the climax, his cell phone buzzes and he checks the caller ID.

  “Sorry,” he says, then dives into a conversation in hyper-animated French.

  While he talks, I look out the car window at the Eiffel Tower, looming industrial and gray above the Seine, and at the symmetry of the linden trees, their leaves like yellow paddles, which line the broad street. Frédéric hangs up and plunges back into the story: “And he was showing me the cloth—of course, he had no idea who I was or where I worked—and saying ‘Nice, nice! Dor-may! Dor-may! Must buy!’ And the name woven into the selvage of the fabric was Dormeuill—with two l’s. I left him my business card.” His phone buzzes again.

  “Terribly sorry,” he says. He glances from phone to road and back to phone, then props the device on the steering wheel and uses his thumbs to type and his fingers to drive. After he sends the text, he looks over at me, and says, “Now, where were we?”

  Actually, I’m not so sure. I feel as if I’ve been around the world a few times since Frédéric picked me up at my small hotel near the Arc de Triomphe to drive me to Palaiseau, the Paris suburb where Dormeuil has its headquarters. Frédéric, who has the oblong face, ebbing hairline, lanky frame, and boarding-school elocution of a young British royal, is a whirlwind in a double-breasted suit. As the commercial director of Dormeuil Mode (his uncle, Dominic Dormeuil, is president), he handles all the international marketing, and oversees its just launched menswear line, which is already being sold in more than fifty countries. That means he travels almost nonstop. One week it’s Shanghai for a trade fair, the next it’s New Zealand to inspect the merino flocks, India for a luxury conference, New York for a salute to the tuxedo, São Paulo for a store opening.

  “I once flew round-trip to Japan from Paris in a day,” he tells me, changing lanes and speeding past a slow-moving truck. “That was a tough one.”

  His travels, I am quickly learning, have given him a wealth of material on which to unleash his Streep-ian linguistic skills, which he does repeatedly, with caffeinated gusto, as we head south.

  Frédéric Dormeuil comes from a long line of indefatigable traveling salesmen. He is the sixth generation to hit the road for the company, which was founded in 1842 by his great-great-great-grandfather Jules Dormeuil, a twenty-two-year-old Frenchman with muttonchops, who had the idea of importing English wool to Paris. Encouraged by his early Channel-straddling success, Jules and the family members who soon joined him spun the globe and started packing. They loaded big leather cases with fabric samples—meltons, whipcords, cheviots, and serge—and lugged them onto railcars or ships bound for Yokohama, Casablanca, and beyond. When they arrived, they wrestled the trunks onto wheezing buses, or strapped them onto the backs of donkeys or camels, and set off in search of men and women who wanted clothes—and tailors who needed good cloth. They were sometimes away from home for years.

  Dormeuil’s headquarters, a boxy low-rise in an industrial park, gives no hint of the rigors—or romance—of the dusty road. It is not until I trail Frédéric through the lobby, past the low blond-wood tables and potted ferns, and down to the basement cutting room that I get a taste of that. Dormeuil’s entire collection is stored here. There are miles of cloth woven with yarn spun from the world’s great fluff: merino wool, cashmere, mohair, and vicuña. Near a bank of windows, a few men stand over unfurled cloth on long worktables, holding shears so oversized that they make me think of long-winded mayors and small-town ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

  Woolen mills produce cloth in what are called pieces, seventy meters long, and one and a half meters wide, Frédéric tells me as we walk along the bins of rolled fabric. Almost all of the firm’s cloth is woven and finished in West Yorkshire, England, which has been a center of textile manufacturing for centuries. Bulk buyers take the whole roll, but tailors need only small amounts at a time. They rely on merchants like Dormeuil to warehouse stock and provide a “cut length” service, from which they can order only what they need—generally, 3.2 meters, or roughly four yards, for a suit, less for jackets and trousers. Dormeuil cutters process about four hundred lengths every day, starting in the morning, with orders that have come in from Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and Europe, and finishing the day with requests from the United States.

  “It’s a real skill,” Frédéric says. “You’re holding these massive scissors, and every time you must cut perfectly straight lines through all kinds of different-textured materials, some of which are extremely expensive. You have to know what you are doing. Ideally, you should have a passion for it. But it’s getting harder to find people who have the skills and the passion. I’m afraid the glamour of a local bar job can often be more tempting.”

  After the cloth is cut, it is packaged and shipped overnight to the customer. I take a look at the labels on four wrapped bundles on a cart close to me. They are headed to tailors in Milan, Azerbaijan, New York, and Tokyo.

  Beyond the cutting tables are rows of tall metal library shelving. The company archives are preserved here, in hundreds of sample books. Some of the volumes are labeled in French, some in English: “Été 1889,” “Winter Suitings 1914,” “Ladies 1936.” In one aisle, there are books devoted to blacks for mourning and whites for tennis. Frédéric takes a few volumes down from the shelves and brings them over to a table for me. Each lined page has a dozen or so small squares of cloth glued down its margin—some are frayed, some half-attached, some snipped back to nearly nothing. Next to the swatches are comments and numbered codes, written in flowing fountain-pen ink, indecipherable as hieroglyphics.

  There are pages of solids and tweeds and florals. I linger over one array of sober charcoal-gray checks, which at first glance seem identical. But, looking closer, I see a thin vein of blue in the weft in one, a filament of maroon in the warp of another. Study any of these scraps long enough and each becomes an intricate grid, the careful work of one man who puzzled over the design for days before deciding that this line should bisect that one, unless, hang on … wouldn’t it be that much better if they never met?

  “Fantastic, aren’t they?” Frédéric says. “People from couture houses pay us visits to see what we were doing in the nineteen-twenties or thirties, and costume designers working on period films come to make sure they get the look just right.”

  Dormeuil fabrics regularly appear on high-fashion runways—Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, and Prada, to name a few, are all customers. The mills Dormeuil works with can do superluxury cloth in short runs, and respond quickly to the whims of designers.

  “That’s one of our great advantages. The Chinese mills make masses of meters,” Frédéric says. “They can’t do small batches. The couture side doesn’t want big runs. Designer X will say, ‘We only want twenty meters because we’re making ten dresses, nothing else.’

  “Sometimes we show a designer this season’s collection, and he takes a look and says, ‘Hmm. Change the stripe.’ Or he will suddenly say, ‘I want brown.’ And we’ll say, ‘But the collection for this season, with regret, isn’t offering brown. It’s more of a blue theme.’ And he’ll say, ‘No, it’s brown. Since one minute ago.’ We meet some fascinating people, very eccentric people. They change their minds, and if we want to stay in business, we have to move quickly.”

  Their contribution to haute couture generally goes uncredited.

  “On the couture side, there are very big players—they don’t need the name Dormeuil to sell,” Frédéric goes on. “We’d love to say we made the cloth, but we’re very much the back o
ffice with them. We have draped phenomenal people—presidents, actors. But we don’t have the right to say it, because we aren’t the final garment producer.

  “Sometimes I will verbally let a trusted few know about who a certain fabric is going to. I’ll say, ‘That’s for the Sheikh of X,’ or ‘Actor A is going to wear that in his next film.’ It makes something that might be a bit dull for them more interesting. We made a suit for a well-known sportsman—it was a personal gift—and I told the ladies who were inspecting the cloth at the mill in England who it was for. They were thrilled.”

  Frédéric slips into a broad, glottal West Yorkshire accent to reenact their reaction.

  “ ‘Oh, so ’ee’ll be wearin’ it, then? That’s luhv-lay, luhv-lay.’ ”

  Until a few years ago, when Dormeuil took over the Minova Mill in West Yorkshire, the company’s goods had been produced to its specifications in independently owned mills. It was never content to be an anonymous supplier, however. After World War I, Dormeuil began to market its fabrics like Cognac or cologne, giving them catchy names and pushing them in print ads that were aimed not at tailors but at consumers. The firm also started having “Dormeuil” woven into the selvage of every fabric it distributed—a first in the textile world. By putting its name on the cloth, the firm took the limelight from the manufacturers and cemented its own status as a luxury brand.

  In the archives are samples of the company’s first big hit, a Scottish tweed called Sportex, which debuted in 1922. A heavy, plain weave of twisted wool, it was touted as being breathable, crease-resistant, and thornproof—just the thing for hunting, riding, and golf. (When the costume designer for Baz Luhrmann’s remake of The Great Gatsby needed cloth for an accurate period wardrobe, she used Dormeuil’s Sportex Vintage.)

  With Sportex, Dormeuil pioneered not only the concept of apparel made specifically for active pursuits but also the idea that the endorsement of a famous athlete could help sell clothing. In 1934, it persuaded a promising and dapper young British golfer named Henry Cotton to wear Sportex apparel when he played in the British Open. Cotton won, setting a one-round course record of sixty-five in the process, and went on to become one of his generation’s most celebrated golfers. Dormeuil recruited other top golfers to wear Sportex, as well as the French tennis superstars René Lacoste and Suzanne Lenglen, and the ski champion Émile Allais.

  Print ads kept Sportex in the public eye through the forties, even as World War II limited the availability of wool for civilians. “If your tailor can’t get Sportex—supplies are very limited—remember the name. You’ll be glad you did when the days of peace and petrol come again,” read one ad in a 1941 Illustrated London News. Postwar, Sportex took off. Dormeuil did four hundred versions of the cloth and adapted its marketing campaign, decade to decade, to mirror the times. The 1960s ads are period gems, featuring men with Austin Powers sideburns and wide-lapel plaid suits holding hunting rifles or leaning against sports cars next to leggy women in microminis. Sportex, one ad said, “was designed for men to get birds in sights or girls over barrels.”

  Dormeuil had another big success in Tonik, an iridescent suit fabric that was launched at a cocktail party at London’s Park Lane Hotel in 1957. The cloth paired combed wool in the warp with angora-kid mohair in the weft. The natural sheen of the silky mohair was enhanced by being passed over a hot steel roller, which singed the surface. Tonik had a firm hand and was wrinkle-resistant—“like a bulletproof vest,” according to one Tonik wearer. It became the fabric of choice for the slim suits worn by London mods and some of the era’s most influential dressers: Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack pals, Miles Davis, and Michael Caine, whose three-piece midnight-blue Tonik suit was almost a character unto itself in the 1971 cult film Get Carter. It didn’t hurt that Dormeuil’s provocative gender-bending Tonik ad campaign featured Veruschka, the six-foot-one Prussian, who was approaching the zenith of her supermodel fame. Dormeuil couldn’t make the cloth fast enough—and mills everywhere raced to copy it. Eventually, the word “tonic”—spelled with a c—became a generic term for any fabric with that hip two-tone sheen.

  I look over at the archives. Somewhere, buried in those hundreds of books and thousands of pages, there may be squares of the vicuña overcoat fabric that Ashley Dormeuil, Frédéric’s late uncle, sold to John Cutler in 1984. Over months of emails, I had asked Frédéric if the cloth could be traced. I had the style numbers and pictures of the label. I wanted to know where it had been spun, which mill had woven it, and where it was finished. Frédéric tried, but it seemed that his uncle had left no record of the sale and told no one else about it. The origin of the vicuña cloth was a mystery.

  There were mills on both sides of the Atlantic weaving vicuña—Worumbo in Lewiston, Maine, Stroock in New York, Northfield Mills in Vermont—but Dormeuil almost certainly would have stocked cloth only from U.K. mills.

  Johnstons of Elgin, a Scottish firm that was an early pioneer in the spinning and weaving of vicuña, could have woven the cloth. James Johnston got his first delivery of Peruvian vicuña from a Glasgow wool broker in 1849. The fleece may have been smuggled out of Peru inside larger bales of alpaca. In any case, James Johnston wasn’t impressed. “It turned out much coarser than I expected and was more difficult to work so that I shall lose money by it and not likely to try more,” he wrote in a letter to his supplier. Eventually, he found a better source, and won a medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851 for his vicuña shawls.

  There were other U.K. mills showing vicuña at that exhibition. The official catalog lists John and Abraham Bennett; Hargreave & Nussey; J. T. Clay & Sons; John Biddle; the Fownes Bothers; William Bliss; and Moxon, among others.

  Pure vicuña cloth was not a specialty of Dormeuil’s, but the supplier could get it for any customer who requested it—regardless of how he intended to use it. In a taped interview, a very dapper Ashley Dormeuil recalled a time in the early 1970s when a woman came into the Paris shop with an unusual request.

  “She said, ‘What is the best fabric you have?’ I told her it was vicuña,” Dormeuil recalled. “So, I said, ‘What would you like it for? An overcoat, perhaps?’ And she said, ‘No, I want to put in on the backseat of my Rolls-Royce to ensure that my dogs will have a most comfortable ride. How much do you think I’ll need?’ ”

  Frédéric leads me upstairs to Dormeuil’s showroom, where we stand over a round, flat black box embossed with gold lettering that reads DORMEUIL VANQUISH II. He lifts the cover off the box with a flourish, like a waiter raising the silver dome on a Wagyu rib eye. Inside is a sample of Dormeuil’s top-of-the-line cloth, a blend of 60 percent Pashmina (the company’s trademarked name for a very fine cashmere from Pashmina goats found in India’s Ladakh region), 30 percent vicuña, and 10 percent musk ox, or qiviut. The cloth sells for $5,000 a yard, a reflection, in part, of the difficulty with which qiviut (which Dormeuil calls “Qiviuk”) is harvested.

  Each musk ox drops about six pounds of hair when it molts in the spring. Most qiviut is collected in the wild by nomads, who trail the herd and pick it, one wispy pennant at a time, from thorn bushes or rocks where it was snagged as a shedding animal passed by. Researchers have looked for more efficient and reliable ways to gather the fluff. In one experiment, giant combs were mounted to random boulders in Canada’s Northwest Territory, in the hope that the animals might brush against them. This, alas, did not prove to be the boon to qiviut collectors that researchers had envisioned.

  “It was hit or miss,” admitted Sharon Katz, the inventor of the Muskomb, when I contacted her a few months after my visit to Dormeuil. “And the sites that were more reliably visited by the animals were far away from communities, which was not insurmountable, but … lowered the enthusiasm.”

  Collecting by hand, it takes about a year to get anything substantial, according to Frédéric.

  “And even then we can only use ten to fifteen percent of what they have collected,” he said. “Plus, the shortness of the qiviut fibers makes it extremely difficult
to weave. That’s why we only do ten percent.”

  Vanquish II isn’t a huge seller, but it has served as an effective attention-getter among people who are attracted to over-the-top luxury. In 2009, the entrepreneur Alexander Amosu, who had made a fortune selling hip-hop ringtones and diamond-bedazzled cell phones, partnered with Dormeuil to create a Vanquish II suit. Stitched by hand with gold and platinum threads, and garnished with eighteen-karat gold and diamond buttons, it was sold to a British businessman for more than $100,000. Brioni also used Vanquish II to make suits, which, without the precious gems, were a mere $43,000. The cloth generated a lot of publicity—and got what Dormeuil wanted: the attention of Russian, Indian, and Chinese tycoons who covet exotic, expensive cloth.

  “There are customers who always want the latest ‘super’ cloth,” Richard Anderson, a London tailor, told me later. Anderson is one of the new generation of Savile Row tailors and the author of Bespoke: Savile Row Ripped and Smoothed. He offers his clients both Vanquish II and Guanashina, another top-end Dormeuil cloth woven with a blend of kid pashmina, yearling cashmere, and South American baby guanaco, a camelid cousin to the vicuña whose fiber is almost as fine.

  “And there are people who simply hear about something amazing and want it. A few years ago, for example, an airline magazine did a small piece on Guanashina and a new customer flew from Hong Kong to order two suits, with platinum buttons. He simply had to have them—regardless of price.” Each suit cost roughly $30,000.

  Dormeuil and other premium cloth makers never stop looking for ways to lure high rollers with exotic blends and appealing stories. Dormeuil recently began making a cloth called Jade, which is tumbled in the finishing process with powdered jade stone, a gem associated with good fortune in Asia. Scabal, one of Dormeuil’s main competitors, weaves twenty-two-karat-gold threads into a suiting fabric. It also does a wool-silk blend woven with yarn that has been impregnated with microscopic diamond fragments, and another that has been pummeled with tiny bits of lapis lazuli. Scabal was also looking into weaving a cloth with platinum ore.