Factory reset: Patrick Grant on the importance of making clothes in the UK

Britain has an amazing heritage of making high quality textiles and clothing. In the past, these manufacturers played an important role in their communities: as well as being the biggest employers, they provided towns with a civic identity and their employees with both a sense of pride and the prospect of a long career.

As UK manufacturing has declined, all that has disappeared. Blackburn, for example – one of the world’s most important cotton producers in the 19th century, and where my brand Community Clothing is based – has seen the heart ripped out of it. Like many others, this town in Lancashire has been forgotten, and despite the government’s talk of ‘levelling up’, nothing is being done to help it.

I set up Community Clothing in the hope of helping former textile-producing areas rebuild manufacturing, which I believe has an important place in society’s future. It’s a field that provides fantastic jobs, which over the past 30 years we’ve come to look down upon and have undersold to young people as careers.

We often laud individual craftspeople who make objects in workshops – shoemakers, chairmakers or knifemakers, say. The factories we work with harbour the same amount of skill, just divided between multiple craftspeople to increase efficiency and make more affordable products. On Savile Row, a single tailor will sew a jacket, while one of ours will pass through 14 pairs of hands. Where it is possible to use a machine without affecting the final quality, they will do so. But there is craftsmanship at every stage of the production.

We have a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with more than 30 local manufacturers. For example, our jersey comes from three mills in the East Midlands, and we source much of our yarn from Manchester, from the only remaining cotton spinner in the UK. Everything we produce is traceable: we know that everybody is paid well, and that aspects such as the dyeing process are as clean as they can be. Of every pound a customer pays us, almost 65p goes to the people who make our products – those who grow the fibre, spin it, dye it, weave it, cut it, sew it, print it. Elsewhere, this is can be closer to 25p.

At the moment, the only affordable clothes are the ones that are doing harm to both people and the planet. Many will never know what it’s like to wear a beautiful pair of leather shoes or a heavy, pure cotton sweatshirt, because they can only afford a glued-together polyurethane shoe or a polyester sweatshirt that feels nasty from the day you wear it. But we’ve shown that it’s possible to pay people properly and do less harm to the planet, while keeping prices reasonable.

We’ve done this by removing many of the usual complications of running a clothing business. We don’t change our collections every year so we don’t have new design costs every few months. We have engineered out the waste: the fabric we’re using for our raincoats this year will be the same next year. Our factories are nearby, so we’re not flying products across the world. Because we sell everything at the best price we can, we never mark anything down. We spend almost no money on marketing because we have a story that interests people – when they buy something from us, they tend to come back for more.

Our vision is for every object to have enduring value – I still have clothes that I bought in my teens that are in good condition. But who will want a second-hand fast-fashion garment in 30 years? We need a change in mindset. We need to feel happier buying less and using garments again and again. Since the 1950s, the fashion industry has been telling us we’ll feel happy when we have something new. Instead, we need to learn to feel happier with less, and to find joy in well-crafted objects that get better the more we use them.

communityclothing.co.uk