Where the Cloth Comes From

The fabric is half the suit. This is not a figure of speech. A bespoke garment cut from mediocre cloth will always be limited by its raw material, regardless of how precisely it is made. And a fine cloth handled carelessly will never reach its potential. The relationship between tailor and textile is the foundation of everything we make, and it begins not in our workshop but in the mills — in the weaving sheds of the West Riding of Yorkshire, the looms of Biella and Como, the finishing rooms of County Donegal — where the cloth is made before we ever see it.

Our primary English sources are Holland & Sherry, Dormeuil, and Dugdale Brothers — all mills with histories that run deeper than our own. Holland & Sherry have been weaving in Hawick since 1835 and maintain one of the most comprehensive cloth libraries in the world. Their Super 150s worsteds have a precision of weave that reveals itself most clearly in the way they hold a crease and recover from a long day. Dugdale's Bespoke bunches are a fixture in our workshop for the same reason they appear in the finest ateliers on Savile Row: consistent quality, wide colour range, and a cloth that behaves predictably under the iron and the needle. These are not fashionable selections. They are foundational ones.

From Italy, we work primarily with Loro Piana, Caccioppoli, and Vitale Barberis Canonico. Loro Piana's dominion over fine fibres — baby cashmere, vicuña, Royal Alpaca — is well known, but it is their worsted and linen ranges that we reach for most often: cloths with a fineness of hand that Italian weaving achieves more naturally than any other tradition. Caccioppoli, based in Naples, produces cotton and cotton-silk blends that sit in a register that English mills rarely explore — slightly warmer in tone, more relaxed in drape, perfectly suited to the unstructured summer commissions we increasingly receive. Vitale Barberis Canonico's Perennial and high-twist ranges are the workhorses of our warm-weather wardrobe recommendations.

What we look for when we handle a new bolt is not easily described in technical terms, though technical terms exist for all of it. We look at the selvedge for evenness of tension. We fold the cloth against itself to see how it recovers. We hold it to the light to read the density of the weave. We pass it between the fingers to feel the twist in the yarn and the finish on the surface. We smell it — a fine wool has a particular warmth that polyester blends do not. And we drape it over a shoulder, because a cloth that does not drape well will not make a suit that drapes well, regardless of how it is cut. The bolt that makes it onto our shelves has passed every one of these checks. The bolt that does not goes back to the mill.