“Of course, there is the danger that the [exotic fabrics] appear too gimmicky,” Michael Day, a Scabal designer, told me in an email. But, he added, the Chinese, Middle Easterners, and Russians, who are the biggest customers for the pricey blends, don’t seem bothered by that.
Some bespoke customers aren’t satisfied with what is available to the general public. They want custom-made clothing, produced with custom-made cloth.
“I had a customer who couldn’t find a Prince of Wales check to his liking,” Richard Anderson said. “It’s a wonderful cloth, but nothing too special, since it’s so popular and available in a wide range of fabrics. So we commissioned an exclusive pattern for him, with a beautiful green overcheck. He would have been the only man in the world wearing it, but he allowed five lengths to be made into suits for other Richard Anderson customers, creating a small club of ‘brothers in check.’ Perhaps this is true luxury—the ability to have something made for you that no one else, or only a few people closely linked to you, could have.”
Cloth fiends can even have their name or other words woven into the pinstripe of their suit fabric. Scabal and Holland & Sherry both offer that service. Among those who have taken personalization to the extreme is Hosni Mubarak, whose suit stripe spelled out his name. Tom Benson, the owner of the New Orleans pro football team, has “New Orleans Saints” and “Super Bowl Champs” (a gift from his wife, who boldly counted on them taking the championship) woven in gold on his suit. Evander Holyfield has two custom cloth suits. One has pinstripes that spell out the words “The Champ” and the other says “The Champ Again.”
William Halstead, a mill founded in 1875, even began offering a “design your own cloth service,” in which it would produce enough fabric for just one suit using a hundred-year-old sample-making loom. The customer could commission any color, weight, pattern, and raw material—even pure vicuña—for his exclusive use.
Meanwhile, in order to supply the seemingly limitless appetite of the superrich for luxury cloth, fabric developers continue to search out new sources of fine fiber. Looking for an alternative to Chinese cashmere, for instance, Dormeuil reps trekked to Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked country in central Asia with a large goat population. Researchers had discovered that some herds living in remote areas of the Pamir Mountains, where crossbreeding had not occurred, were producing cashmere comparable to the highest quality found in China and Mongolia.
“The [farmers] always think of the local goats as being the bottom of the heap,” said Carol Kerven of Odessa Centre, a research firm based in England, who oversaw the testing. “When we tell them that their goats produce some of the best cashmere in the world, their eyes become very big.”
In order to help them collect the finest fiber, Kerven taught the herders to comb the fleece rather than shear it and showed them how to sort it for quality. In the past, the farmers had sold fleece unsorted by weight alone. Dormeuil uses what it calls Kyrgyz White in a collection of high-end suit fabrics.
Exotic fibers don’t always catch on. In 2006, Scabal marketed a cloth made with Siberian ibex, or yangir, a wild mountain goat that inhabits the Mongolian highlands. Despite a promotional campaign that claimed it produced a cloth even softer than vicuña, yangir was a dud. The company abandoned the collection.
Cloth makers are looking beyond the animal kingdom for new sources of luxury fabric. In 2010, the Italian cloth maker Loro Piana introduced a linen-like cloth woven by hand from fibers extracted from giant lotus flowers that grow on Lake Inle, in southeast Burma. (The fibers had traditionally been used to weave robes for Buddhist monks, but the monks had to find a cheaper alternative.) Only a few hundred people in one lakeside community still have the skills required to extract and spin the fibers—tasks that must be done within twenty-four hours of pulling the plants up out of the mud. Two thousand stems are required to get a little more than a yard of fabric. Loro Piana committed to buying the community’s entire production of about fifty-five yards a month, and paid in advance. The clothier sells lotus jackets in Europe for about $5,600. Because of trade sanctions with Burma, however, lotus-cloth apparel cannot be sold in the United States.
“The temptation is to keep looking elsewhere,” Frédéric tells me. We have moved to a conference room surrounded by shelves of “bunches”—the swatch booklets showing Dormeuil’s current collections. “We are always thinking, What can we mix? What can we play with? What is warm? What hangs well? What feels nice?
“But you also have to be careful not to take your eyes off the ball. We’ve nearly forgotten about wool. We have to reignite excitement about it, to let people know this wool comes from this farm … [to focus on] traceability and education. We haven’t really done that, because we assumed people knew about it. It’s just always been there.”
Wool—whether from a sheep, an alpaca, or a vicuña—has much to recommend it. It is renewable (animals start regrowing fleece shortly after being sheared), non-flammable, absorbent, elastic, breathable, washable, durable, an effective shield against UV rays, and an efficient insulator that keeps the wearer warm in winter and cool in summer.
It is also biodegradable, an important feature when you consider what is happening in landfills all over the world. Pound for pound, we toss four times as many textiles in the trash today as we did in 1980. Thanks largely to the lure of constantly renewed inventory of cheap and trendy apparel in fast-fashion retailers such as H&M and Topshop, we buy more than twice as much clothes as we did in the mid-1990s. The explosion in disposable apparel has also made workers in the developing world vulnerable to sweatshop conditions and rivers polluted with dyes and pesticides. It’s not just the factory towns that are being fouled. Researchers from University College Dublin found that polyester clothes shed toxic microscopic lint every time they go through the wash. The fibers were found on six continents where coastlines were tested; some beaches were more polyester fragments than they were sand.
Wool is mostly keratin, and it will break down. Polyester and nylon are petroleum-based and will be with us for a very long time. (Textile makers are developing polyester fabrics, trimmings, and zippers that are truly biodegradable.) But wool isn’t perfect. As it decomposes, it releases methane, the greenhouse gas linked to climate change.
Textiles are among the most valuable recyclables. Pre-consumer textile waste—that is, by-product materials from the textile, fiber, and cotton industries—can be recycled into new raw materials for the automotive, furniture, mattress, coarse-yarn, home-furnishings, paper, and other industries. Post-consumer waste from recovered textiles—even clothes that are stained or ripped—can be turned into rags and polishing cloths. Knitted or woven woolens can be broken down into fibers used for car insulation or seat stuffing. Other types of fabric can be reprocessed for upholstery, insulation, and building materials. Buttons and zippers can be stripped off garments for reuse.
Some agencies and businesses are trying to make it easier to recycle old clothes. In 2011, New York made donation bins available at apartment buildings all over the city, for the convenience of car-less residents, who would otherwise be tempted to toss old clothes into the trash.
The fast-fashion retailers have also tried to make amends—among them the world’s largest retailer, H&M, which was lambasted in 2010 after trash bags full of unsold clothing that had been destroyed and rendered unwearable were discovered behind its Manhattan store. H&M has introduced collections of clothes made with recycled polyester and organic cotton. It also used fabric remnants for its collaboration with Lanvin to construct a limited collection called Waste. In May 2012, the store encouraged customers to bring in unwanted clothing of any brand name to donate to the Red Cross.
Marks & Spencer launched a campaign in 2012 called “Shwopping” in partnership with Oxfam, which encouraged shoppers to drop off an old item when they bought something new. The U.K. retailer hoped to recycle 350 million pieces of clothing a year. Patagonia, a leader in the reuse of textiles, partnered with eBay to sell used Patagonia g
ear as part of the Common Threads Initiative, in which shoppers were asked to take a pledge to buy less, repair what is broken or torn, sell what isn’t wanted, and recycle everything else. Even Hermès got on the reuse bandwagon: the luxury manufacturer debuted a small collection called Petite H, featuring products made from leftover or rejected scraps of leather and silk.
Back in Paris, I don’t see any recycled items in the Hermès store on Avenue George V. I do see many Chinese shoppers, with shopping lists in hand. I also see, at the end of the long glass display case, a salesman who has spread out half a dozen silk scarves in front of a middle-aged woman with gray blunt-cut hair. The woman is going through each one, holding it up to her neck, studying herself in the mirror. She goes back and forth, holding, considering, laying down one and picking up another.
“I don’t know,” I hear her say.
Now she seems to be favoring an equestrian print, now a bold floral. She goes back to the horses. I notice that her hands are shaking.
“I don’t know.”
The salesman is patient. I sense that he has been through this many times before. The woman picks up the scarves again, drapes first one, then another, around her neck.
“I can’t decide,” she says. This goes on for several more minutes.
“I am going to leave and go have a coffee,” she says, finally. “I need to think.”
“Yes, yes, madame. Go,” the salesman says. “Think about it. Take some time.”
I leave Hermès and walk up to the Champs-Élysées. I pass the new three-floor H&M flagship store, designed to blend in with the classic Haussmann architecture. (In 2007, planning officials had voted overwhelmingly to ban the store, saying the posh boulevard was being overrun by global chain stores and fastfood restaurants. H&M appealed—and won.) I walk through the crowds until I come to a Zara. I have been thinking that I need something to jazz up the simple gray shift dress (T. J. Maxx, rayon-polyester-spandex, made in China) I was planning to wear out to dinner with Frédéric. I browse around until a short motorcycle-style leather-like jacket catches my eye. It is edgy, I think, a little sassy. I am probably too old for it, but I’m feeling madcap and Parisian. And it really does look like leather, even though the label and the price tell me that it most definitely is not. It is—do I have to even say it?—a product of China. I think I look pretty good in it. The saleswoman agrees.
Back in my hotel room, I put on the gray dress and the new jacket, then head across the street to a tiny restaurant with red walls called La Cave Lanrezac. I find Frédéric sitting at the bar. He is impeccable in a navy pin-striped suit and a pale-pink shirt with white collar and cuffs. The proprietor seems to know him. They are conversing in French, pausing occasionally to purse their lips as they contemplate something that seems particularly perplexing, then blasting off again.
The restaurant has no wine list. Instead, diners are invited to walk down some back stairs to a basement wine cellar, from which they select their own bottle. I follow Frédéric down the narrow stone steps, and he finds what he wants right away.
Over dinner, we talk about Paris and clothes. I ask Frédéric if he can explain the difference between the feel of bespoke and the feel of off-the-rack.
“You know when you rent ski boots? Off-the-rack feels like that.”
“Can you spot bespoke on people?”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “Always. I always look.”
I am pretty certain that he can also spot faux leather.
Later, when I am back in my room, I think about the woman in Hermès and the way her hands trembled as she touched the lovely silk scarves. She was overcome. Someday, I think, I would like to feel that way about buying a beautiful thing. In the morning, I do something I have never done before. I put the jacket back in the shopping bag, walk up Avenue Carnot, cut down into the tunnel under the Arc de Triomphe, and emerge on the Champs-Élysées. I walk down to the Zara store, go in, and take the jacket up to the returns counter. I had kept the tags. The woman doesn’t ask any questions, just takes the jacket from me, refunds my money, and smiles.
“Merci,” I say, and walk out of the store, feeling free.
John inspected the vicuña cloth for any imperfections or damage. It was flawless. Then he took a hot iron and began to press it, using plenty of steam. This would remove the wrinkles and shrink the fabric so that no further shrinkage would occur in the process of making the coat. When it was ready, he began placing the pieces of the overcoat pattern on the cloth, making sure that they were all going to fit. He moved pieces around until he settled on a “lay”—the positioning of the pattern. He checked to ensure that all the sections were going in the same direction, with the pile of the fabric facing down. Then he checked one more time. It would be a disaster, a very expensive disaster, to cut any piece going against the nap.
Everything looked good. He anchored the pattern pieces with weights, and then took a fresh piece of tailor’s chalk from the chalk box. He began to draw around each pattern section, at times using a gentle flowing touch and at times attacking the outline with the drama and flourish of an avant-garde painter.
He looked over the chalk lines. Satisfied, he did what he always did at this crucial point in the process. He ran his heavy cutting shears through his hair to capture the slight film of oil that made the blades move smoothly. Then he slid the shears into place on the cloth and began to cut.
To business that we love we rise betimes,
And go to’t with delight.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
I am in the heart of northern England’s textile country, standing atop Emley Moor in the lifting fog of a cold November morning. It’s hard to believe that not far from these open stone-fenced fields, with their constellations of grazing sheep and gates of moss-flocked wood, modern industry—in all its rattling, combustive beauty—was born. Engines changed everything about making cloth and about the lives of the people who made cloth—slowly at first, with many hands upon the odd new machines, then at a brisker pace, with fewer hands, until, at last, people were not much needed, except to push the Go button.
A post-breakfast walk has taken me to this green flank in the Pennine foothills above the River Colne and the valley that was ground zero for the Industrial Revolution. I had arrived by train the night before in Huddersfield, a big, blocky mill town about two hundred miles north of London that is to textiles what Detroit is to cars—both a symbol of entrepreneurial triumph and an emblem of sour decline. At Frédéric Dormeuil’s suggestion, I’d taken a taxi out to a rural inn with a pub serving fresh Irish oysters and pints of Black Sheep Best Bitter. My room had a four-poster bed, blue-and-white toile wallpaper, knocking radiators, and long views of the moorlands.
I walk back to the inn to wait for Bryan Dolley, a fabric designer and consultant for Dormeuil, who has agreed to let me trail him as he makes his rounds from spinner to weaver to finisher. When the athletic-looking broad-faced sixty-year-old in a light-gray suit walks into the lobby, I am surprised by his sunniness and vigor. I was, I realize, expecting someone more out of the dark Victorian mill mold—stooped, perhaps, and with just a touch of consumption.
In Bryan’s silver Jaguar, we head out of the hills on the narrow roads he knows well. He was, he tells me, raised in Huddersfield and never left.
“My mothers’ side of the family were all local people, and nearly everyone worked in the mill—Crowthers Mill,” he says. “My grandfather was a weaver, as were his predecessors as far back as I know. Everyone had to be at work at seven a.m. in those days. If you were late, they locked the gates at seven-ten, so you missed a full day’s pay. The weavers all wore wooden clogs—I don’t know why—and you could hear the stampede of feet at six-fifty-nine coming down the cobbled streets.”
Bryan wanted to go to art school in London, but his final exam scores kept him from attending.
“I had a temporary job working in one of the mills at the time, so when my test results came through the mill boss said I should stay with them. T
hat was the only career decision I ever made.”
Bryan worked his way up the ranks and eventually started his own company, developing and selling premium cloth. His work has taken him around the world.
“I travel to see whoever has the money at the time,” he says. “Today, it’s China, India, and Russia. Before that, it was the United States, Japan, the Middle East, and South America.”
He also goes in search of the best raw materials for his clients.
“You can pick up the phone and call the commodity guy, but to actually go to New Zealand and pick out the best bales—totally traceable, even down to the sheep, which are numbered—I love that. It’s a fantastic job.”
As we drive, Bryan points out clusters of old weavers’ cottages. He tells me about the old days, when cloth making was based in homes like these and everything was done by hand. Families got wool from their own sheep or from local brokers, then made what they needed and sold their surplus at a weekly market. On the ground floor of the stone houses, the women and children carded the wool to separate and straighten the fibers, then spun it into yarn. Upstairs, by large mullioned windows that provided the natural light needed for weaving, the men operated the heavy handlooms. When the pieces were done, they brought them to a local finisher, who washed the cloth in the soft, acidic water that ran down from the peaty hills. It was hard work, but, by most accounts, it was an agreeable way to live. Everyone was employed, and they made their own hours. The weavers were respected as skilled craftsmen and earned decent money. In warm weather, the women took their spinning wheels outside and the men tended to their gardens and animals.
A series of mid-eighteenth-century inventions changed all that. John Kay’s flying shuttle allowed for the making of wider cloth, effectively doubling the productiveness of hand weavers. That increase in production spurred inventors to come up with devices that would also speed up the spinners’ output. James Hargreaves introduced the spinning jenny, a contraption that made it possible for sixteen threads or more to be spun at once by a single person. Richard Arkwright’s water frame, powered by fastmoving streams, could spin stronger threads than the jenny, at a more rapid pace. The spinning mule, invented by Samuel Crompton, produced even finer yarn a thousand times faster than previous machines. Both the water frame and the spinning mule were too large for home use, so small factories were built to house them. When Edmund Cartwright unveiled his power loom in 1785, operated first by water wheel and then by steam engine fueled by local coal, it ushered in an era of mass production and capitalist entrepreneurs.
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