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Developing Drape

The Secret to Dormeuil’s Beautiful Cloth

A little known secret behind the finishing of Dormeuil luxury cloth is the cloth development during the washing process before the fabric is finally finished. When fabric comes off the loom after being woven, it is unfinished and looks and feels nothing like the final product. Many mills will simply put the fabric through a fast track finishing process on the “right side” of the cloth (to make it matt or shiny) and consider the fabric ready to sell… Not so at the House of Dormeuil. 

Using natural soap and famous Huddersfield pH neutral water from a bore-hole underneath the mill, Dormeuil cloth is gently rotated through this water, over a period of hours, via the wooden rollers on a “Dolly Scour” machine. Why go to all this extra trouble? Only through this slow and gentle process of washing will the fibres develop and evolve into the lustrous yarns that produce exclusive Dormeuil cloth with such incredible drape and handle. 

Once the fabric has been washed and the fibres allowed to reach their full potential, the multiple ingredients of the final finishing are applied (to both sides of the cloth). Dormeuil’s unique bespoke finishing processes are not available to any other mill or merchant in the world which is one of the many reasons why Dormeuil cloth is so special and so unique. After all, quality doesn’t happen by accident…

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