How Fox Brothers Makes the World's Best Flannel
Fox Brothers has been weaving flannel in Wellington, Somerset, since 1772, making it one of the oldest continuously operating textile mills in England. For over two hundred and fifty years, the mill has produced the cloth that Savile Row tailors, Italian sartorialists, and discerning ready-to-wear brands specify when they require flannel of uncompromising quality — a supply chain that begins with raw wool and ends with bolts of fabric whose hand and drape set the standard for the global suiting industry.
Flannel is not a weave but a finish — a process of controlled shrinking and brushing that raises the surface fibres of a worsted or woollen cloth, creating the soft, slightly fuzzy texture that distinguishes flannel from sharper, smoother suiting fabrics. Fox Brothers' finishing process involves multiple passes through fulling machines, teasel frames, and rotary presses that transform ordinary woven wool into the plush, luxurious material the industry demands.
The Fox Brothers flannel favoured by Savile Row typically weighs between 12 and 14 ounces per metre — substantially heavier than the lightweight flannels mass-market brands use to reduce cost. This weight provides the drape and body that allows a flannel suit to hold its shape throughout a day of wear, creating the flowing, three-dimensional silhouette that is impossible in lighter cloths.
Grey flannel, in its medium and charcoal variants, is Fox Brothers' signature product. The cloth achieves its grey through a blend of black and white wool fibres mixed before spinning — a technique called stock-dyeing that produces a richer, more complex colour than piece-dyeing grey onto white cloth. The resulting grey has a depth and liveliness that flat-dyed fabrics cannot replicate (https://www.foxflannel.com).
The mill's relationship with Savile Row is symbiotic. Anderson & Sheppard, Huntsman, and Henry Poole all maintain standing orders with Fox Brothers, and the mill produces exclusive patterns and weights to individual tailors' specifications. This bespoke cloth production, at quantities sometimes as small as a single bolt, would be economically unviable for mills operating at industrial scale.
Fox Brothers survived the collapse of the British textile industry — which destroyed most Somerset mills by the 1980s — by refusing to compete on price and instead positioning its flannel as a luxury material worthy of premium pricing. Douglas Cordeaux acquired and revitalised the mill in 2009, investing in heritage looms and reconnecting the brand with the quality-conscious tailoring community.
The lesson Fox Brothers offers is that mastering a single material — not a product line, not a brand aesthetic, but a specific textile — can sustain a business for a quarter of a millennium. Their flannel succeeds because no competitor has matched the combination of fibre selection, weaving technique, and finishing expertise that two hundred and fifty years of focus have produced.
