Vanners feature in 'The Rake' Issue 6

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Article by Simon Crompton;  Photography by Andrew Barnham

Many brands say their products are made in the UK. It’s a
label, with definite appeal in export markets like Japan and
Italy. There is a presumption that articles made in the UK
are embedded with tradition and history; that these brands represent
timeless style and elegance. But often, the physical difference this
history makes to a product is hard to put your finger on.
The exception is archives. Any manufacturer that has been
in the business for most of the past century will have patterns and
garments that reflect every English style over the decades. From the
conservatism of the 1930s, through the newfound freedom of the
’50s, into the brash colours of the ’80s. Combine that resource with
staff that know the archives inside out, and you have a bottomless
well of inspiration.
When Savile Row tailor Richard James travels down to Vanners
in Suffolk to pick silk for his new range of ties, he goes straight for
the stuff from the 1960s and ’70s. Out come the synthetic materials
and the bold patterns, all chronologically catalogued in new plastic
folders. When Michael Drake from Drakes visits Vanners, he heads
for the more classic patterns of the 1930s. Bound in crumbling red
leather, these volumes are dominated by small geometrical patterns on
darker backgrounds. There are a lot of pin dots and small hexagons.
Burberry, Turnbull & Asser, Polo Ralph Lauren: they all come
down to Suffolk to plunder the Vanners archives. With archives going
back to the late 1800s (the company was founded in 1740), Vanners’
collection is pretty extensive. And the natural methods it has always
used help preserve the collection — many weavers in Europe in the
past used tin oxides to ‘weight’ the silk, giving it greater bulk but
accelerating the rotting of the material over time. So, few weavers
have the same archives as Vanners.
Of all men’s garments, ties are particularly easy to catalogue. As
shapes and cuts remain relatively constant, the pattern and colour
are all you need to capture a trend. A small three-inch square piece
of silk can summon up the 1920s fad for complex patterns redolent
of kilim rugs. A longer strip of colourways illustrates the concurrent
trend of dense, burnt-looking patterns.
From inspiration to samples
Using that swatch to commission a tie is not as easy as one might
think, though. The first problem is that you have to pick a pattern
in isolation from its colour. Most of the patterns are displayed on a
single, unremarkable background — navy, say, or brown. It’s easy to
let colour seep into your decision and prefer one pattern because it is
in a tonal combination you like. Also, how much opinion do you really
have on small, geometric patterns? Does it make a big difference
whether the pattern is a diamond or a triangle?
More impressively, most of the designers who buy from Vanners
will ask for a slightly altered version of the pattern —making it denser,
blowing it up or scaling it down. In fact, the trend for this coming
season, according to Vanners director Andrew Henry, is small,
simple patterns, often using bold prints from the 1970s or ’80s, but
shrinking them to much smaller, subtler versions.
“The art at this stage is to be able to see behind the pattern,” says
Henry. “To be able to see it 50 percent bigger, on a different weave or
in different combinations.”
The second issue has to do with picking the colours. Most
men know what colours they like in their ties. But if your design
has a pattern of circles, with a small dot inside each circle, do
you really have any idea what colour the dot should be? It makes
a big difference.
Hardest of all, though, is the third issue: warp. All woven ties are
constructed on two directions of silk: warp and weft. The warp is the
skeleton of the tie — it often lies underneath a pattern and influences
its tone. The weft usually contains most of the main body of the
pattern. On a closely woven rep tie, for example, you will hardly
see any warp. But you will with a broad twill, where the warp shows
between the lines. And with a checked pattern, half of the pattern is
necessarily warp.
Once you’ve selected the pattern and a few possible colours (for
the weft), a sample blanket is spun on one of Vanners’ vast, hulking
looms, with each weft choice overlaid on each of the firm’s standard
21 colours of warp. The result is a checkerboard of combinations,
with each of the weft options subtly influenced by the warp colour
that provides the basis for the cloth.
Many of the combinations will be horrible. An orange paisley
does not look great woven onto a lime-green warp. But then some
designers like odd mixtures. Italian tailor Borrelli, for example,
often seeks bright and unusual combinations, and varying the warp
is key to this.
... And samples to weaving
Everything else is easy, from the designer’s point of view at least. Pick
the warp/weft combinations you like, and let the looms do the rest.
When working the looms, each weft is fed in at right angles between
the two layers of warp that form the shed, and the thread (the pick)
is battened against the existing cloth by the reed at speeds of around
340 times a minute.
Such is the speed of the loom that each thread has to be retained
at an individual tension — if it were allowed to come off a spool, it
would snap with the pressure. If a thread does snap, though, the staff
can use a weaver’s knot to connect a new line, which is so small as to
be invisible in the final cloth.
Corrections can also be made at the inspection stage. For a delicate
material, errors can be quite easily picked out of silk by cutting away
a knot and leaving the loose ends to fall back into the cloth. This has
to be done on both the front and back of the cloth, as imperfections
on the back can distort the front over time as the tie is worn.
Then, the silk just has to be rolled up and carefully packed for the
tie-makers. And you thought the sewing of ties was complicated...