WEAVING

Apart from Japanese selvage denim, fabrics are woven in the UK and USA, and are either custom-woven to original designs or adopted from industrial applications.

All the fibres used are natural cotton, wool, or bast (from flax and similar plant stems), and fabrics are generally cut raw, or loom-state. This means that the cloths are not preshrunk or given standard finishing processes after weaving. The clothes have to be made up large, and are shrunk to their final size either with a rinse, or during garment dyeing. Shrinking the fabric on the garment, rather than as a flat textile, gives the clothes life and three dimensional character which is not achieved with a finished cloth. ‘Unborn’ clothes are sold in their original oversized form, before being washed- they will shrink to size and come to life with their first laundering or soak.

Many of the fabrics are cross-woven, meaning that the design is introduced into the weft (cross) yarn, rather than putting it into the warp (length). This is a more labour intensive weaving process, but allows for greater flexibility in design, as very short lengths of different patterns can be woven onto the same warp, and it generates unusual twill patterns which would not be produced with a normally woven cloth.