Was our chino more gooder than the goodest of your chinos¹? (spoiler: no)

At Loom, our mission is to design the most hard-wearing clothes possible with the smallest possible impact on the planet and on people, all without sending prices through the roof. In other words, we want our clothes to offer the best “quality-ethics-price” ratio. But in 2018, we realised that wasn’t really the case for the second generation of our chino. We bought half a dozen chinos from various brands and compared how well the colours held up after six fairly rough wash-and-dry cycles: 40°C without turning them inside out (sacrilege) + tumble dryer. And we weren’t exactly thrilled with the results: while not a disaster, our chino was far from the most hard-wearing.

So we decided not to place any new orders for this chino, and to stay out of stock until we’d taken the quality up a notch.

One small patch of indomitable fabric

A fabric is a bit like a dish at a restaurant. You can pick the one with the best ingredients, and sometimes the recipe still isn’t up to much. Even if you select the best yarn, the best weave and the best dye, the only way to be sure a fabric is the strongest is to test it. So we got hold of as many samples as we could, from different suppliers and in different compositions, and put them through the washing machine a dozen or so times. And we discovered that, somewhere deep in a small Gaulish village, one small patch of indomitable fabric was still holding out against the wash. That fabric was made by Velcorix, a company based in Alsace, in northeast France. Er, sorry: Velcorex.

Velcorex’s trade is weaving and “finishing” fabrics, for example by turning them into velvet or dyeing them (handy, that). At a time when the entire French textile industry was moving production to Asia, Velcorex’s boss, Pierre Schmitt, did everything he could to keep the business in Alsace by going all out on quality. The upshot: the factory now employs 100 people and is running at full capacity (you can hear him talk here and join us in his fan club). Since dyeing and wastewater rarely get along, they built their own treatment plant and _{all their products are OEKO-TEX® certified}. That’s how you end up with a textile factory in the middle of the Ballons des Vosges Nature Park.

Looking for the next sewing superstar

Our first garment maker was fine, but not great. We realised that to improve our chino, we needed to work with a factory as obsessed with quality as we are. That’s how the guys at Velcorex introduced us to Andreia. It was September 2018: Loom was still small, and so was Andreia’s factory in Porto. Since then, Andreia has taken on about ten people. Our two companies have been growing side by side, and we have to admit it’s made us a tiny bit sentimental about each other. We worked with her on every one of the chino’s weak points:

• Seams splitting? We switched to a sewing thread three times thicker.
• Threads getting pulled on the inside? We covered the seams with bias binding so that can’t happen.
• Waistband sagging over time? We reinforced it with a thicker fusible interfacing.
• Fly buttons always coming off in the end? We switched to a zip (YKK, naturally) and a metal button.

And to avoid selling you a pair of trousers for over 100 euros, we worked with her on simplifying the construction: a single back pocket, no coin pocket (who actually uses it?), no “V-notch” at the back, the size printed on the composition label instead of a second, separate label...

The master of patterns

We had the fabric, we had the garment maker; all we needed now was the right pattern. Sure, it matters that a pair of trousers makes your backside look good, but if they’re going to last, a good cut also has to minimise stress on the seams and fabric rubbing. So we called in someone who knows their stuff: the trouser pattern maker at a major fashion house. It took us half a dozen prototypes to get to a cut we were really happy with.

Test me, hate me, but above all, look at meeeee

We don’t want to repeat our early mistakes, so we test the chino, then test it again. Step one: putting it through several 40°C-wash-plus-tumble-dryer-and-all-that-right-side-out cycles. You can see with the naked eye that the results are pretty good: there’s a little fading, but the colour holds up very well, even in high-friction areas like the fly and the belt loops.

Step two: wear this chino. A lot. For several weeks, the guys on the team wore one prototype after another, and in the end refused to take off the final version (legend has it they washed it overnight so they could put it back on in the morning). The verdict: not only is it super comfortable (with just enough elastane to hop on your bike easily), it also barely loses its shape (no “bagging” at the knees, for example). That’s down to a secret: our fabric contains elastomultiester filaments, which help it spring back very well to its original shape after being stretched.

Nobody’s perfect

This chino isn’t perfect. It’s simply the best compromise we’ve found so far between quality, ethics and price. Here’s everything we think could still be improved:

• The fabric is mercerised to make it stronger, but at first this makes it a little shiny and prone to static. These effects wear off after one or two washes, but we’re working on changing that.
• Before being dyed in Alsace, the cloth is woven in Pakistan. To insist on it being woven in Spain or Alsace (which is our plan), we need to place slightly bigger orders.
• The cotton is conventional cotton. We’re working with Velcorex on an organic cotton version that’s just as hard-wearing, but we don’t know how long that will take.
• One of the secrets behind this chino’s toughness is the use of elastomultiester (a polyester derivative).
• Even after simplifying the construction and cutting our margin to the bone, we can’t sell it at the old price (60 euros). So it’s a little more expensive, at 75 euros.

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January 2021 update

• The cotton in the chino is now organic.
• The fabric is less shiny and less prone to static than in the 3rd generation, thanks to a tweak in the fabric stabilisation process.
• The crotch is now reinforced with a double seam.
• The size chart has been adjusted so the chino is slightly slimmer at the hips.
• The cotton yarn and the fabric are made closer to home: spinning in Turkey, weaving in France.
• The chino costs 5 euros more than before, because it costs us 10% more to make.

Notes

¹ This phrasing isn’t a grammatical mistake: it’s a nod to "plus bonne que la plus bonne de tes copines" (roughly “more gooder than the goodest of your girlfriends”) by the French rap group NTM, in case, like one inattentive member of the Loom team, you missed the reference.

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Who are we to say that? 

You’re reading La Mode à l’Envers, a blog run by the clothing brand Loom. The textile industry is in a sorry state, and the planet is footing the bill. So whatever we manage to understand about this industry, we try to explain here. Because making clothes that last is good, but revealing, sharing and inspiring is even more powerful.

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