The Coat Route (14 page)

Dormeuil fabrics regularly appear on high-fashion runways—Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, and Prada, to name a few, are all customers. The mills Dormeuil works with can do superluxury cloth in short runs, and respond quickly to the whims of designers.

“That’s one of our great advantages. The Chinese mills make masses of meters,” Frédéric says. “They can’t do small batches. The couture side doesn’t want big runs. Designer X will say, ‘We only want twenty meters because we’re making ten dresses, nothing else.’

“Sometimes we show a designer this season’s collection, and he takes a look and says, ‘Hmm. Change the stripe.’ Or he will suddenly say, ‘I want brown.’ And we’ll say, ‘But the collection for this season, with regret, isn’t offering brown. It’s more of a blue theme.’ And he’ll say, ‘No, it’s brown. Since one minute ago.’ We meet some fascinating people, very eccentric people. They change their minds, and if we want to stay in business, we have to move quickly.”

Their contribution to haute couture generally goes uncredited.

“On the couture side, there are very big players—they don’t need the name Dormeuil to sell,” Frédéric goes on. “We’d love to
say we made the cloth, but we’re very much the back office with them. We have draped phenomenal people—presidents, actors. But we don’t have the right to say it, because we aren’t the final garment producer.

“Sometimes I will verbally let a trusted few know about who a certain fabric is going to. I’ll say, ‘That’s for the Sheikh of X,’ or ‘Actor A is going to wear that in his next film.’ It makes something that might be a bit dull for them more interesting. We made a suit for a well-known sportsman—it was a personal gift—and I told the ladies who were inspecting the cloth at the mill in England who it was for. They were thrilled.”

Frédéric slips into a broad, glottal West Yorkshire accent to reenact their reaction.

“ ‘Oh, so ’ee’ll be wearin’ it, then? That’s luhv-lay, luhv-lay.’ ”

Until a few years ago, when Dormeuil took over the Minova Mill in West Yorkshire, the company’s goods had been produced to its specifications in independently owned mills. It was never content to be an anonymous supplier, however. After World War I, Dormeuil began to market its fabrics like Cognac or cologne, giving them catchy names and pushing them in print ads that were aimed not at tailors but at consumers. The firm also started having “Dormeuil” woven into the selvage of every fabric it distributed—a first in the textile world. By putting its name on the cloth, the firm took the limelight from the manufacturers and cemented its own status as a luxury brand.

In the archives are samples of the company’s first big hit, a Scottish tweed called Sportex, which debuted in 1922. A heavy, plain weave of twisted wool, it was touted as being breathable, crease-resistant, and thornproof—just the thing for hunting, riding, and golf. (When the costume designer for Baz Luhrmann’s
remake of
The Great Gatsby
needed cloth for an accurate period wardrobe, she used Dormeuil’s Sportex Vintage.)

With Sportex, Dormeuil pioneered not only the concept of apparel made specifically for active pursuits but also the idea that the endorsement of a famous athlete could help sell clothing. In 1934, it persuaded a promising and dapper young British golfer named Henry Cotton to wear Sportex apparel when he played in the British Open. Cotton won, setting a one-round course record of sixty-five in the process, and went on to become one of his generation’s most celebrated golfers. Dormeuil recruited other top golfers to wear Sportex, as well as the French tennis superstars René Lacoste and Suzanne Lenglen, and the ski champion Émile Allais.

Print ads kept Sportex in the public eye through the forties, even as World War II limited the availability of wool for civilians. “If your tailor can’t get Sportex—supplies are very limited—remember the name. You’ll be glad you did when the days of peace and petrol come again,” read one ad in a 1941
Illustrated London News
. Postwar, Sportex took off. Dormeuil did four hundred versions of the cloth and adapted its marketing campaign, decade to decade, to mirror the times. The 1960s ads are period gems, featuring men with Austin Powers sideburns and wide-lapel plaid suits holding hunting rifles or leaning against sports cars next to leggy women in microminis. Sportex, one ad said, “was designed for men to get birds in sights or girls over barrels.”

Dormeuil had another big success in Tonik, an iridescent suit fabric that was launched at a cocktail party at London’s Park Lane Hotel in 1957. The cloth paired combed wool in the warp with angora-kid mohair in the weft. The natural sheen of the silky mohair was enhanced by being passed over a hot steel roller,
which singed the surface. Tonik had a firm hand and was wrinkle-resistant—“like a bulletproof vest,” according to one Tonik wearer. It became the fabric of choice for the slim suits worn by London mods and some of the era’s most influential dressers: Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack pals, Miles Davis, and Michael Caine, whose three-piece midnight-blue Tonik suit was almost a character unto itself in the 1971 cult film
Get Carter
. It didn’t hurt that Dormeuil’s provocative gender-bending Tonik ad campaign featured Veruschka, the six-foot-one Prussian, who was approaching the zenith of her supermodel fame. Dormeuil couldn’t make the cloth fast enough—and mills everywhere raced to copy it. Eventually, the word “tonic”—spelled with a
c
—became a generic term for any fabric with that hip two-tone sheen.

I look over at the archives. Somewhere, buried in those hundreds of books and thousands of pages, there may be squares of the vicuña overcoat fabric that Ashley Dormeuil, Frédéric’s late uncle, sold to John Cutler in 1984. Over months of emails, I had asked Frédéric if the cloth could be traced. I had the style numbers and pictures of the label. I wanted to know where it had been spun, which mill had woven it, and where it was finished. Frédéric tried, but it seemed that his uncle had left no record of the sale and told no one else about it. The origin of the vicuña cloth was a mystery.

There were mills on both sides of the Atlantic weaving vicuña—Worumbo in Lewiston, Maine, Stroock in New York, Northfield Mills in Vermont—but Dormeuil almost certainly would have stocked cloth only from U.K. mills.

Johnstons of Elgin, a Scottish firm that was an early pioneer in the spinning and weaving of vicuña, could have woven the cloth. James Johnston got his first delivery of Peruvian vicuña from a Glasgow wool broker in 1849. The fleece may have been
smuggled out of Peru inside larger bales of alpaca. In any case, James Johnston wasn’t impressed. “It turned out much coarser than I expected and was more difficult to work so that I shall lose money by it and not likely to try more,” he wrote in a letter to his supplier. Eventually, he found a better source, and won a medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851 for his vicuña shawls.

There were other U.K. mills showing vicuña at that exhibition. The official catalog lists John and Abraham Bennett; Hargreave & Nussey; J. T. Clay & Sons; John Biddle; the Fownes Bothers; William Bliss; and Moxon, among others.

Pure vicuña cloth was not a specialty of Dormeuil’s, but the supplier could get it for any customer who requested it—regardless of how he intended to use it. In a taped interview, a very dapper Ashley Dormeuil recalled a time in the early 1970s when a woman came into the Paris shop with an unusual request.

“She said, ‘What is the best fabric you have?’ I told her it was vicuña,” Dormeuil recalled. “So, I said, ‘What would you like it for? An overcoat, perhaps?’ And she said, ‘No, I want to put in on the backseat of my Rolls-Royce to ensure that my dogs will have a most comfortable ride. How much do you think I’ll need?’ ”

F
rédéric leads me upstairs to Dormeuil’s showroom, where we stand over a round, flat black box embossed with gold lettering that reads
DORMEUIL VANQUISH II
. He lifts the cover off the box with a flourish, like a waiter raising the silver dome on a Wagyu rib eye. Inside is a sample of Dormeuil’s top-of-the-line cloth, a blend of 60 percent Pashmina (the company’s trademarked name for a very fine cashmere from Pashmina goats found in India’s Ladakh region), 30 percent vicuña, and 10 percent musk ox, or qiviut. The cloth sells for $5,000 a yard, a reflection, in part, of
the difficulty with which qiviut (which Dormeuil calls “Qiviuk”) is harvested.

Each musk ox drops about six pounds of hair when it molts in the spring. Most qiviut is collected in the wild by nomads, who trail the herd and pick it, one wispy pennant at a time, from thorn bushes or rocks where it was snagged as a shedding animal passed by. Researchers have looked for more efficient and reliable ways to gather the fluff. In one experiment, giant combs were mounted to random boulders in Canada’s Northwest Territory, in the hope that the animals might brush against them. This, alas, did not prove to be the boon to qiviut collectors that researchers had envisioned.

“It was hit or miss,” admitted Sharon Katz, the inventor of the Muskomb, when I contacted her a few months after my visit to Dormeuil. “And the sites that were more reliably visited by the animals were far away from communities, which was not insurmountable, but … lowered the enthusiasm.”

Collecting by hand, it takes about a year to get anything substantial, according to Frédéric.

“And even then we can only use ten to fifteen percent of what they have collected,” he said. “Plus, the shortness of the qiviut fibers makes it extremely difficult to weave. That’s why we only do ten percent.”

Vanquish II isn’t a huge seller, but it has served as an effective attention-getter among people who are attracted to over-the-top luxury. In 2009, the entrepreneur Alexander Amosu, who had made a fortune selling hip-hop ringtones and diamond-bedazzled cell phones, partnered with Dormeuil to create a Vanquish II suit. Stitched by hand with gold and platinum threads, and garnished with eighteen-karat gold and diamond buttons, it was sold to a British businessman for more than $100,000. Brioni also used
Vanquish II to make suits, which, without the precious gems, were a mere $43,000. The cloth generated a lot of publicity—and got what Dormeuil wanted: the attention of Russian, Indian, and Chinese tycoons who covet exotic, expensive cloth.

“There are customers who always want the latest ‘super’ cloth,” Richard Anderson, a London tailor, told me later. Anderson is one of the new generation of Savile Row tailors and the author of
Bespoke: Savile Row Ripped and Smoothed
. He offers his clients both Vanquish II and Guanashina, another top-end Dormeuil cloth woven with a blend of kid pashmina, yearling cashmere, and South American baby guanaco, a camelid cousin to the vicuña whose fiber is almost as fine.

“And there are people who simply hear about something amazing and want it. A few years ago, for example, an airline magazine did a small piece on Guanashina and a new customer flew from Hong Kong to order two suits, with platinum buttons. He simply had to have them—regardless of price.” Each suit cost roughly $30,000.

Dormeuil and other premium cloth makers never stop looking for ways to lure high rollers with exotic blends and appealing stories. Dormeuil recently began making a cloth called Jade, which is tumbled in the finishing process with powdered jade stone, a gem associated with good fortune in Asia. Scabal, one of Dormeuil’s main competitors, weaves twenty-two-karat-gold threads into a suiting fabric. It also does a wool-silk blend woven with yarn that has been impregnated with microscopic diamond fragments, and another that has been pummeled with tiny bits of lapis lazuli. Scabal was also looking into weaving a cloth with platinum ore.

“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.”