The Textile Mill That Said Hello to Dali

Why would a chap want to wear four cravats? It’s how Salvador Dali depicted the fashion future and in Yorkshire they have taken up the challenge. Michael Hickling reports.

I wore the most elegant suits, a cultured pearl necklace, bracelets and silk shirts, which I had designed, with puff sleeves that gave me a feminine look. The age of the dandy had begun, and for me it was never to end.” This was Salvador Dali, the Spanish surrealist, writing about his early student life in Madrid when he first acquired a taste for fashion.

This outlandish figure whose relentless self-promotion and bizarre exploits made him one of the world’s most famous artists is not someone you would easily associate with New Mill.

It fits snugly into a cleft in the Holme Valley, in countryside cosily familiar to anyone who has ever watched Last of the Summer Wine, which is filmed down the road at Holmfirth.

A corn mill in a medieval times gave it a name, but it was textiles which delivered prosperity to New Mill. Within a few yards of the friendly post office in the centre is a clutch of imposing mills built in stone. They stand in dramatic locations beside the tumbling river that once provided the power and whose wonderful softness brought out the best from the fruit of the looms.

These days, developers’ advertising boards, offering upmarket apartment conversions, stand at the entrance to all of them. There’s one exception. But you have to look for it behind the undistinguished prefabricated bulk of a fitness centre. Here you find a mill which has been home to various worsted makers and on what used to be a finishing house – where the washing, cutting and pressing part of the job was carried out – the chiselled date on the stone says 1779.

Today, the Bower Roebuck mill is inspired by the whims of Salvador Dali. The starting point of the ideas behind their new spring and summer clothing collection is a set of 12 paintings the artist made 35 years ago. For ideas, Dali drew on images of Renaissance princelings and came up with his own eccentric view of how the male peacock of the 21st century might look.

One of them shows a blue-faced man with a butterfly-decorated headpiece entitled Man of the Year 2000 who will be gastronomically stereoscopic and stereochemical. Scoff if you like. It might look a bit out of place in West Yorkshire, but it’s the sort of off-the- wall innovation which gets them squeaking with delight in the international fashion business.

But what brought that slightly unreal, bling-bling world to a dyed-in-the-wool, feet-on-the-ground place such as New Mill? The answer to both questions turns out to be straightforward.

In this unfashionable and out-of-the-way valley bottom they have a reputation for turning out extraordinary and exotic fabrics that are the envy of the world. The geography round here may suggest inward-thinking, indeed home weavers still existed in the village Skelmanthorpe seven miles away as recently as 1914.

But the mill’s formula for success is based on looking outwards and being a global player in a small market.

American presidents wear cloth from these looms on their backs. Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida and brother of George W, ordered some with his name running through the fabric. Hollywood studio names – Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson and Daniel Craig – can’t do without it. Footballers’ wives purr to see their men in Pounds 10,000 suits which have originated here and been fashioned in Savile Row. Here is a place which offers the strangest contrasts. Just off a road where you half-expect Compo to come rolling by, they routinely handle cloth which seems the stuff of Dali’s imagination. They manufacture one (a world first) which involves crushing diamond fragments to incorporate into the yarn. Another has in it lapis lazuli, a gemstone said to have aphrodisiac qualities. Yet another weaves in 22 carat gold. Innovation is the name of the game. For this season Salvador Dali is cutting-edge. And if you need to keep your exclusive work under wraps until the last minute, you could hardly find a more suitable place than New Mill. Bower Roebuck started here in 1899 when two families joined together. The company is now the weaving arm of the owners, called Scabal Group which is based in Brussels and whose designer, Michael Day, comes from Huddersfield. The twelve Dali originals which inspired the new collection are also in Brussels. They are locked in a vault where they have been since 1971, when one of their employees, who was a friend of Dali’s personal assistant, commissioned them.

When the other textile mills in the Holme Valley are being turned into apartments, how did this one keep going? Ronald Hall, Bower Roebuck’s managing director, says they are the lone survivors in New Mill because of the textiles focus of the parent company.

He came down from weaving country on the Scottish Borders to work in Yorkshire 30 years ago and has watched as the other mills have gone to the wall. One of them, a cashmere coating and finishing house, was bought by a Swedish entrepreneur who promptly “realised all the assets”, as the phrase goes.

“What to do with a run-down mill?” says Ronald Hall. “At one time you couldn’t get rid of it, it was a millstone round your neck. Now there’s a new pressure. What are you going to say to a developer – if there is no return from textiles – who is willing to pay Pounds 2m for the land? New Mill is a prime location, we’re bang in the middle between Leeds and Manchester.

“One of the prime benefits we have of being owned by Scabal is that their core business is quality textiles. We are their technical arm and the backing given to us in terms of investment shows they are fully aware of the need to be at the

niche end of the market. Years ago you found big Indian corporations getting involved in the textile business. They came in and maybe took over a finishing plant to incorporate into a grand plan. But if it doesn’t give the return they want, they’re out.”

Is it a risky business, tickling the fancies of the super-rich? “As long as Europe is looked at as the fashion and style leader of the world, I have no problems. It’s when fashion comes to be dictated from Japan or somewhere else that you’ve lost everything.” In the fashion centres of the world, the news that a mill in Yorkshire produces this kind of material is met with incredulity. “People find it hard to believe it is really still made here. We invited some Savile Row chaps here to see the manufacturing. Some had worked in the industry for 50 years and had never seen the cloth being made. They were very proud it was British,” says Ronald Hall. On the visit of Savile Row’s finest to his mill, he was happy to show them the only new warping machine outside Italy. These days the machines are not manufactured in West Yorkshire as they once were, but in Germany and Switzerland. There’s one thing however for which there’s no German or Swiss alternative – the water. “It is this water that gives the weaving mill what it needs to produce the most delicate and luxurious cloth. It’s so soft. Wash your hair here and in London and you’ll see what I mean.”

For many years the company’s pool of skilled labour was replenished by other mills closing. It started drying up about five years ago, so they re-introduced their “mending school”. It takes at least four years to train a worker in the school and acquire the required skills. They need the sharpest eyesight and the deftest hands to scroll through every inch of new cloth to pick up any flaws and mend them invisibly. About 90 per cent of the mill staff live within a six-mile radius of the mill, but the two latest recruits to the mending school are Polish.

The mill relies entirely on Australian and New Zealand Merino wool. Production of it is so finely-tuned they can trace the source from sheep to suit.

So what’s wrong with Yorkshire wool? “English wool is not fine enough,” says Ronald Hall. “In Australia and New Zealand the husbandry is phenomenal.” How they feed their animal is crucial to the end product. The farmers will even change the pasture if they see a risk to the fibre length of the wool. The weather plays a part in the elasticity of the raw fibre – an important consideration when it comes to weaving it. The drought currently afflicting parts of Australia has already pushed up the price of top-quality Merino by up to 30 per cent in the past 18 months. The language of fashion is international but producing material which has global appeal does have snags. The taste of the peacock male of the Far East is quite different from his European cousin. Koreans, for example, want their suits to shine like a mirror. No sheen at all thanks is the French and Italian request. Shiny or not, the common denominator is cash. The average price of a Scabal suit at their shop in Savile Row is between Pounds 3,000 and Pounds 6,000. If Sir requires one with his name running through it, the order will take three months to deliver the cloth to the tailor and another month making it up. In this over- heated world, the search for the new is relentless. “In a way it’s a rod for your own back,” adds Ronald Hall. “You are continually asking, ‘what does this guy want?’ And people are always asking, ‘What have you got that’s new? You hear it all the time. That’s our forte.” The photo shoot for the new collection was done in the dramatic surroundings of New Mill. To the uninstructed eye, it’s hard to spot just where Salvador Dali comes into the picture. But he has inspired the new Scabal cravat tie, through his painting of a young man entitled a maximum of four cravats worn by anaemic nympholeptic high school kids of the future. The Dali model is not slavishly followed – instead of four separate cravats in real life, they are inter-leaved within one. Maybe that’s what happens when Spanish surrealism collides with English understatement. Fashion victims will be relieved about that.

(c) 2008 Yorkshire Post. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.