On Friday we’ll be launching our hand-woven Madras shirts, a collaboration we’re really proud of – both because of the people we visited in Chennai that made it so authentically, and because of the unique comfort and quality of the cloth.
It’s not been an easy process. Hand-loomed cloth is wonderful – more supple and cool than any other cotton I’ve tried – but it’s a bugger to make with.
The only way to produce any kind of volume is to have more than one person weaving it, and that means every piece comes out slightly differently. Both the different wooden looms and the different individuals make that inevitable.
This makes it hard to match up patterns across the panels of a shirt, and given Madras is best known as a checked cloth, it’s a common issue.
“The material is lovely, but we had to cut the shirts almost individually in order to make sure everything worked together,” says Luca Avitabile, who makes the shirts in Naples.
There was also concern that the sewing machines wouldn’t be able to use a sufficiently big stitch to cope with the cloth – being an open fabric, hand-woven Madras will unravel if you use too fine a stitch. Fortunately, that turned out not to be an issue.
Travel back to India – and four months in time – and you’re reminded why the cloth is so individual, so human.
One of the first things we saw at the Original Madras facility was three men outside warping yarn for our new fabric. Dressed all in white, they were bent over a rack that stretched 18m down the garden, in between the fruit trees.
Warping is normally done on two big machines – one that draws in the yarn from serried cones alongside it, and the other that creates a big roll of the yarn to feed into a loom. You can see how it’s normally done in our visit to Albini. And even when we made hand-woven tweed in Harris a few years before that, there was still a warping machine (just a wooden one).
With hand-woven Madras, the warp is created in the manner we saw in the garden, and then the roll is created by a contraption that looks more like an old water wheel than a piece of machinery (below).
This warp then goes onto the hand looms, where each individual weaver passes a wooden shuttle through it to add rows (weft) onto the warp, in a plain weave.
I assumed it was this passing through of the shuttle that created the varied tension in the material, and so the different lengths that are causing so many issues for Luca, over in Naples.
But actually it’s the wooden rail that the weaver pulls down onto the cloth after each pass, to push the rows together. Rather like the variation in pressure with which two different baristas tamp down coffee grounds, this human action creates natural variation.
Not sure where that metaphor came from. Maybe I need a coffee.
Anyway, the good thing about this human process is that the Madras cloth is more open, softer and has particular character.
Anyone who gets a shirt (or indeed a length of cloth – we’ll be selling those too) have a look at the little squares and the secondary colours that are woven through it. Every one is slightly different, often with little snakes of colour popping up before burrowing down again.
From a distance, it’s a perfectly legible check, but there’s much more going on up close. This also means you get occasional little ends or slubs, by the way, which is natural variation as much as the variegation of colour.
The cloth in these images has a bright yellow selvedge, which is a signature of Original Madras. For them it references both turmeric (considered to be lucky) and the colour of taxis, which are yellow both in Chennai and in New York, where the company started in the 1970s.
I think the yellow goes quite well with the other colours in this check (one we’re reproducing, by the way, from a linen cloth we did several years ago) but I considered too much to include as part of the finished shirts. It will be there on the lengths of cloth if anyone really likes it and wants to try and incorporate it into their commissions.
I do hope today’s article, and the original one on Original Madras, give some sense of the people and process behind this collaboration. For us that’s always just as satisfying as the style and quality of the final product.
PS Madras shirts in sizes S to XXL will launch on Friday at 9am. It is a relatively small run, but we’ve also ordered more cloth so hopefully can get a top-up before the end of the summer.
Cloth lengths will also be available to buy and send to your shirtmaker (please include your name as a reference in the address, and let them know it’s coming). These will be 2.7m.
