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Fox Brothers
Fox Brothers is a Somerset mill that has woven since the eighteenth century and is the go-to name for English flannel, a heavy cloth that tailors beautifully.
Fox Brothers has woven in Wellington, Somerset since the eighteenth century and is the reference name for English flannel. Its cloth is heavy by modern standards, tailors exceptionally well, and its archive of patterns runs to many thousands of designs.
Flannel
Fox is the mill people mean when they say English flannel: milled, raised, substantial, and cut to weights that have largely disappeared elsewhere. A 13- or 16-ounce Fox flannel trouser behaves in a way a modern light flannel simply cannot: it hangs from the waist, holds a line, and lasts.
The mill nearly disappeared in the 2000s and was rescued; its archive, running to thousands of pattern books, survived with it and is now the source of regular reissues.
Buying Fox flannel
The mill's flannel runs heavier than most modern cloth: 13 to 16 ounces is normal and it goes further. For trousers this is the point: weight is what makes a flannel hang from the waist and keep its line.
It is sold through merchants and directly, and it is the cloth most commonly recommended for a first pair of grey flannel trousers, which is the most useful single garment in a classic wardrobe.
The West of England
The West Country was one of England's great cloth regions, built on Cotswold wool and fast streams. Almost all of it is gone. Fox is among the last weaving businesses of scale in the region, which makes the archive as much a historical record as a design resource.
The archive
Fox holds thousands of pattern books going back into the nineteenth century, recording what the mill wove and for whom. The company reissues cloths from it, which is one of the few ways a modern customer can order a genuinely historical pattern rather than a modern approximation of one.
The archive is also a historical record in its own right: a continuous documentary account of what English cloth actually looked like, decade by decade, from a single source.
Flannel, and what it actually is
Flannel is not a fibre or a weave; it is a finish. The cloth is woven and then milled and raised so the surface fibres lift and obscure the weave underneath, producing a soft, matte, slightly fuzzy face that hangs heavily and takes a crease well.
Fox is the mill most associated with it, from the West of England woollen trade rather than the Yorkshire worsted one, a distinction worth holding onto, because the two regions make genuinely different cloth for genuinely different purposes.
The consequence for a wearer is practical: good flannel drapes and forgives, which is why it flatters a wider range of bodies than a crisp worsted, and why it is the traditional answer for a first odd trouser.
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- Mill history and archive , Fox Brothers.
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