The Coat Route (17 page)

Still, China needs only about a month to decode and turn around a knocked-off design.

“We get one clear season,” Bryan says.

To combat counterfeiting, some fabric makers, including Dormeuil, impregnate DNA into their fabrics to create a genetic fingerprint. A simple swab test shows if it is the real Yorkshire-made deal or a cheap imitation.

Paul takes us to a room full of spinning frames, which are winding dark-blue yarn onto hundreds of bobbins. Bryan walks over to one machine, flips a lever, pulls a spool off its holder, and studies it. Spectrum’s machines look high-tech to me, but their technology, according to Paul, is intentionally less than state-of-the-art. Slower machines allow them to handle the most delicate fibers—even vicuña—and make single pieces for high-end clients.

“It takes time to make quality,” Paul says, as he makes some adjustments to a reel. “Anyone can make the rubbish.”

We stand and watch in silence for a while. I have no clue what is going on in the dark, unseeable reaches of these whirring machines, but there is something very pleasing about the way the spools are fattening up. On the way to the elevator, we pass a paned window, flecked with dirt. I stop and look out at a scene that, over the years, thousands of workers must have peered at. The mist has turned to rain, darkening the sepia walls of nearby mill buildings and creating brown puddles in the parking lot next to the old canal. Except for a single red truck and the green hills visible beyond the rooflines, the scene is as monotone and moody as a tintype.

Once we are downstairs, Paul says, “I have something you might want to see.” He unlocks the door to an office. In the middle of the small room, on a worn cement floor, there is a giant clear plastic trash bag filled with what looks like brown stuffing.

Paul unties the top knot and opens the bag.

“Just got this in,” he says.

I recognize the warm cinnamon color and airy clumps. It is a bag of vicuña fleece—nearly fifty pounds of it, Paul says, just arrived from Peru.

“That’s about forty thousand dollars’ worth. We’ll use that up in about a year.”

Bryan reaches in and pulls out a handful, and tells me I can do the same. I dip in with two hands and lift up a nest-size puff, being careful not to let any escape.

“When were you in Peru?” Bryan asks after we put the clumps back. He has picked up a tag attached to the bag.

“July,” I say.

“Hmm,” he says, studying coded information on the label. “Probably not.”

That’s okay. This may not be
my
vicuña, but I know the road it has traveled.

After Slaithwaite, we head north to Keighley—
“Keethley”
—an old mill town set cinematically at the confluence of the Rivers Aire and Worth. Above it is an amphitheater of gray-green moors, windswept and bleak enough to bring a lump to the throat of every English major, including me, as she passes through on her way to the Brontë sisters’ homestead, just three miles away. Since the 1780s, this valley has been dominated by Dalton Mills, a sprawling stone complex with turrets and arched gateways, which, depending on the viewer’s mood and the density of the cloud cover, could look like either a grand hotel or an asylum for the criminally insane. At its height in the mid to late nineteenth century, Dalton was Keighley’s biggest employer, with two thousand people on its payroll. If you didn’t work there, you worked at one of the thirty other mills or textile machine makers in the valley—or in the pubs and brothels that provided distraction from the monotony of the looms and the pervasive stink of privies and slaughterhouse offal.

By the 1980s, most of the mills had either been abandoned or demolished. Every now and then, a BBC or Bollywood film crew would show up to use the Dalton Victorian façades and loading docks to lend authenticity to their period productions, but for the
most part the things that got attention in Keighley were not things to feel good about. There was the shuttering of Woolworths and the House of Books. There were the tensions between the locals and the growing population of Pakistani immigrants. There were gang wars over control of the heroin trade.
And there was the disheartening, but not altogether unexpected, news that Keighley had been featured in a book of England’s top fifty “crap towns.”

Recently, though, there have been some signs that a pulse beats yet in old Keighley. The Dalton complex is being developed into residences and offices. (Abacus Bouncy Castle Hire and Premier Telecom Solutions have both set up shop there.) The clock in the mill’s high tower is working again for the first time in twenty-five years. An ambitious master plan has been presented by investors, who envision transforming Keighley by 2020 into a town with a walkable and fully restored historic core.

And then there is the remarkable Pennine Weavers—the only working mill left in Keighley—and the reason we are here.

Bryan parks in front of a low building on the banks of the narrow, foliage-obscured North Beck. No one would guess that in this 130-year-old mill, which also houses a paintbrush manufacturer and a Royal Mail warehouse, some of the world’s most valuable fabric is being woven—or that Gary Eastwood, a tall, square-jawed forty-two-year-old former local cricket champ and the mill’s managing director, is a major player in haute couture and bespoke tailoring.

Pennine Weavers was founded as a small-commission weaving operation in 1970 as the town’s traditional vertical worsted mills were closing down. Gary bought the company in 2003. From his small office, we can see through a window to the factory floor, where thirty automated looms produce about thirty-five
thousand meters of fabric every week. This is superb cloth, destined for Burberry, Ralph Lauren, and Armani, among others—and for the cutting tables of the world’s best tailors, including John Cutler and every top Savile Row artisan. Pennine does one hundred labor-intensive loom changes every week, prepping the machines to make short runs of expensive, niche fabrics, including cloth that is woven with twenty-two-karat gold and platinum. Dormeuil commissions half of the mill’s output. This is where Vanquish II, the firm’s delicate wool, musk ox, and vicuña concoction is woven.

“Vicuña is the most expensive fiber we weave,” Gary says. “It’s quite difficult to work with because the fibers are so short. Bryan has to buy up pretty much all the long-fiber vicuña he can to weave one or two pieces per year. And it’s not the strongest yarn. Every time the yarn breaks and the loom stops, there is the potential for a mistake to be made. Vicuña stretches our people and our systems to the limit. Everyone gets a little nervous when they realize the value.”

Bryan takes out a length of metallic thread that he has brought with him. It is pure silver plated onto brass.

“Do you think you can do something with that? In the weft?” he asks. Gary turns it over in his fingers, then calls another man in from an adjoining office.

“Bryan’s got another challenge for you,” he says with a laugh.

We put in earplugs and walk out onto the factory floor, where shuttleless looms are shooting weft yarn across warp. Bryan stops, puts on his glasses, and inspects the gray suit fabric emerging, one thread at a time, from one of the looms. The selvage identifies the cloth as Dormeuil’s Amadeus, a silky lightweight wool that is the firm’s best seller. He runs his hands across the breadth of it and regards it with something that looks very much like love.

Bryan, Gary, and I drive out of Keighley, up into the misted treeless moors of Oxenhope, where the Dog & Gun pub sits along a turn in the road. Inside, at a table near the fire, Gary tells me that he grew up in Huddersfield, the son of a man who worked in weaving.

“I guess it’s in the genes,” he says. “I started sweeping the floors in a mill when I was eighteen and got a degree in textile technology at night. Then I worked in a dyeing-and-finishing plant in India before I came back here.”

Gary’s biggest challenges are passing skills on through his workforce and attracting young people into the business.

“You’ve got to be prepared to work hard. But there are rewards,” he says. “It’s the whole thing about making things. You can’t express yourself putting tins on supermarket shelves. We are making something. For all the ups and downs of the business, we’re doing things here nobody else is doing. I tell the lads here that. They are making things here that no one else in the world can make.”

Back in Huddersfield, we make a quick stop at Paragon Textiles, on a dingy block of low stone buildings. Paragon is the world’s only commission pattern weaver that’s still operating on traditional looms—some of which are more than a hundred years old. Bryan wants to see how a sample turned out—he’s experimenting with yak. He finds the cloth, being slowly banged out by an old loom with giant exposed cogs. Bryan leans over and inspects a length of dark blue emerging from one loom. A cardboard box on the floor near it has yak 10 per cent written in black felt-tip marker.

“It’s like one of my children,” Bryan says, above the noise of the looms. He looks pleased.

Most of Paragon’s employees are close to retirement age, and
the company desperately needs young workers to learn how to operate the machines. But a several-months-long search for two young workers willing to become apprentices had yielded no candidates. None—in a town where the unemployment rate among sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds is nearly 21 percent.

We have one more stop to make. W. T. Johnson & Sons is a textile finisher run by fourth-generation brothers. Walter Johnson started the operation in Bankfield Mills in 1910 to make use of the soft Pennine water, the crucial ingredient in the process of turning woven cloth into something you would want to put on your body. I get out of the car and smell wet wool. Inside, there is a humid chaos of cogs and moving belts and hissing steam, like a train station in a noir film.

Nearly every premium cloth woven in the U.K. is put through Johnson’s Rube Goldberg process of being soaked, scoured, pummeled, stretched, and dried. Without it, even the most expensive worsted cloth feels stiff as wallpaper. To move through the maze of machines, you have to step over narrow channels of moving water and pass open wells. This is the famed local water, filtered by layers of grit stone and shale, which is essential to Yorkshire wool-finishing. In the late 1930s, Johnson astutely decided that he needed his own supply: it took two years of drilling and a fifteen-hundred-foot bore hole to hit water.

Everywhere I look, cloth is rolling in and out of machines, folding onto itself like ribbon candy. Some of the machines are more than a hundred years old, like the one that scours and tenderizes stiff cloth by pulling it wet across wooden rollers. Others are boxy computer-driven units with blinking lights and monitor screens. Some churn out miles of cloth, others just one piece at a time. One passes the cloth across rows of teasels, prickly thistlelike pods that have been used since Roman times to lift nap.
Another shears away nap. One singes the cloth to give it sheen. That one tumbles cloth that contains fragments of precious gems. This machine beats on it until it looks old.

“Ralph Lauren loves that one,” Bryan says.

Everywhere, there are tall stacks of folded cloth, on rolling dollies and on pallets, or draped over stands like layers of horse blankets. Bryan points out the selvage on one pile of black cloth, light enough for a suit coat. The words “100 percent pure vicuña” have been woven into the border. Most of what is stored here is in the business-suit color spectrum, but near the loading dock are stacked bolts of neon lime, intense red, and vivid purple.

“That’s probably for Prada,” Bryan tells me.

No one can be sure if the vicuña for Keith Lambert’s coat was finished here. Nigel Birch, Johnson’s product-development manager, tells me that it would have been a long process—probably ten to twelve weeks—from the time it arrived as raw fiber to the spinners until it was a finished fabric.

“It probably would have been scoured and milled, dried, raised, and drawn—probably on teasel gigs—dried, set by pot-boiling, dyed if it wasn’t woven from dyed yarn, dried, redrawn, cut, brushed, and finally pressed—maybe cuttled and cramped,” he explains.

Regular woven cloth, which comes off the loom feeling stiff, requires about two weeks to go through the twelve-step process of being cleaned, softened, pressed, and dried.

“The object, always, is to have the cloth feel like what it costs,” Bryan says.

Each cloth demands a different treatment, and fabric developers are always experimenting with finishing recipes that will give them the end product they’ve dreamed about. One cloth will be washed on wood for thirty minutes, pressed for five, steamed
for seven, go through two crops, re-steamed, and then put under heat. If it isn’t quite what they wanted, they tweak the process. There are people here who spend all day feeling cloth—scrunching, rubbing, caressing—waiting for their hands to tell them they have it right.

Chinese finishers, on the other hand, don’t have the time, or the expertise, yet, to experiment with cloth. What they do must be uniform, because they’re doing so much of it at one time.

“Finishing is one of the few things that China can’t do,” Bryan says, letting his hand linger on a folded length of dark suiting cloth, before we head toward the door. “You have to be handson. It’s like wine tasting. You can’t invent a machine to do it.”