The importance of aged fabric

I love port wine and Cuban cigars, and the older, the better. Except for Tawnies, most ports do very well with age. In fact they need it. Vintage ports require at least twenty years to reach their potential and even Late Bottled Vintages benefit from bottle ageing (if they are unfiltered, as they should be). Cigars are the same. They are usually unsmokable in the first year and don’t really blossom until they are at least three years old. Some of the cigars in my collection that smoke best are five to ten years old. I’ve even smoked a delicious forty year old H. Upmann while an eighteen year old Graham’s vintage port I recently enjoyed was sublime. But lest you think this article is about extolling the virtues of vintage clothes, it isn’t: I’m talking about the vintage of the cloth itself.

Francesco Pecoraro

The age of suiting had never occurred to me until a conversation a few months ago with Francesco Pecoraro, who recently joined LeatherFoot Emporium as their in-house bespoke tailor. He was showing me a bolt of dark worsted pinstripe about fifteen years old when I asked him if the age made a difference. “Of course,” he insisted, telling me that fabric should sit for seven to eight months at minimum before cutting, “like good cheese or Parmesan.” It needs to age, he said, because it needs to dry out. Fresh fabric may actually contract ever so slightly as it dries. And when you are dealing with a craft that works in the eighth of an inch, that can be dramatic to the eyes of a tailor.

Nicoletta Caraceni of F. Caraceni in Milan holds the same view. She told me that in her father’s day, tailors stocked up on fabric bolts. Mostly this was to help clients in the selection process – it’s always easier to pick suiting based on a couple yards draped over your shoulder than a three inch square sample. But a big reason was also to allow the fabric to age. Nicoleta is fortunate enough, as you can see in the picture above, to still have so many aged bolts dating from her father’s time.

Fabric being woven at the Vitale Barberis Canonico mill.

Having seen first hand the process of weaving fabric at the Vitale Barberis Canonico mill in Biella, Italy I can attest to the fact that there is a lot of water involved. The yarn is washed, dyed and sometimes washed again a number of times. Whole sections of the mill floor are dotted with pools of water and the air feels humid. And it’s not only the water, there are the natural oils and moisture in the yarn. Most tailors today, however, cannot afford to buy bolt after bolt and let it age. They order just as much as they need from a supplier who, hopefully, has some aged stock.

Pictured above is a wasitcoat I recently had custom made from a small amount of tweed left over when Walter Beauchamp Tailors closed their previous location. I don’t have a precise age on it but it’s safe to say it’s at least ten years old. It has a lovely, dry hand and makes a wonderful waistcoat. However, I don’t want to get hung up on old fabric – there’s enough menswear hangups out there as it is. And I’m not saying the older the fabric the better the garment, not at all. I believe once you are past that initial drying stage, a few years or a few decades probably make little difference. However, there is something about the dryness and richness of older fabric that I find very alluring. Not to mention that many fabrics are simply not woven like they used to be – as the subterranean vintage fabric cave at Rubinacci Milan proves.

And so I am most excited about a couple meters of aged fabric I purchased recently in Milan at a tailor’s estate sale. It’s about forty or fifty years old and pictured at the top of this post. Not only does the fabric have a lovely, heavy weight – 14oz – it is bone dry, almost crispy. The hand is scratchy and dense. I cannot wait to have it made into a sport jacket, which I promise to wear while enjoying a fine Cuban and some Late Bottled Vintage port.