The Designer Staging His Own Industrial Revolution

Patrick Grant knows the fashion industry is a mess. Currently at the helm of British label E. Tautz, Grant has over a decade of experience in the business and has amassed a wealth of information about exactly how the 18th century industrial revolution in textile manufacturing got us to the point that making clothes has become a complicated mess of poor working conditions, pollution and inflated pricing. And he’s happy to explain how it all happened.

“Clothing businesses in the UK used to be predominantly small and privately owned,” he says. “There was wave after wave of legislation which made owners of factories and employers dramatically clean up their act. Those textile jobs were great jobs, and that employment was a really important source of income. And then all of that broke down.”

Businesses merged, and stiff competition led to a shift in manufacturing overseas, where labor has long been cheaper—and where production is far enough away that unfair wages and egregious waste has historically been easier for business owners to ignore. “Most of our clothing industry is owned by people who have no personal connection with the manufacturing, the jobs, the people, the towns or any of that,” he adds.

But rather than just educating others about how it all went wrong, Grant has a plan to make it right with his newest venture, Community Clothing.

A line of seasonless basics designed to never be redesigned—meaning if you like Community Clothing’s chambray shirts, khaki harrington jackets, or straight-cut selvedge denim, you’ll always be able to buy more—the brand is Grant’s vision for the future of fashion. It’s simple, trend-free, affordable clothing made efficiently near where it will be consumed, by people who are paid fairly in modern factories, one of which Grant himself owns. And now it’s available in the US for the first time, courtesy of the brand’s just-launched e-commerce site.

Fresh from delivering a TED Talk on the topic, Grant spoke with GQ about leading an industrial revolution of his own.

GQ: Which of the many fashion industry problems are you hoping to address with Community Clothing?

Patrick Grant: The situation that most UK and US and Japanese mills find themselves in—and I’m generalizing—is that for the last 50 or 60 years, the clothes business has been declining. They are in a downward spiral of declining investment and declining efficiency. What I believe is that we can change that around.

If you started from scratch, and you built a purpose-built factory in the UK and invested the same amount of money in it as you would if you invested in a factory in Asia, if you put absolutely the most modern and efficient machinery in there and you trained people to the highest standard and you built it on a scale that was comparable to the scale with the factories that exist in Asia, I think you can manufacture product at almost exactly the same cost as you can in China.

We’re not going to turn the clocks back to an industrial economy that employed, in the US, something like 3.5 million people. You’re not going to get back to that. But, what we can get back to is a modern, efficient, automated clothing and textile factory that has got a sustainable future.

Is automation your secret, then?

I think so. Everybody talks about the fourth industrial revolution that we’re entering into—the rise of artificial intelligence. Certain bits of textile production are very automated now. There’s very little human labor involved in it. [But] sewing clothes is very different.

How so?

Robots hate fabric. Robots like hard things or firm things. They’re very happy to pick up and move around bits of shoes, but they’re really very rubbish at taking two pieces of floppy material and lining it up, putting it in the right place.

You do frequently highlight your factory workers in the Community Clothing story, though.

Well, we think we can probably create 5,000 jobs. When you distribute those around some of the towns in Northwestern England, that’s actually a pretty big deal. In the UK, 40% of people used to be employed in manufacturing. Obviously, we’re not going to go back to those same numbers, but we can make a significant shift and do things in a much better way. We don’t need to be as polluting, because we don’t need to keep shipping stuff around. We can make product that’s better, that lasts better, which has a huge impact on the amount of water that’s used for growing cotton, and [the use of] pesticides.

People don’t like what they’re buying. They don’t like the fact that they know their stuff is made in awful conditions. It doesn’t make people feel happy. We’re supposed to feel happy about fashion! We have a load of new online-only unbelievably cheap brands that are the worst of the worst of the worst. You can buy a dress on there for 5 quid. That’s less than half an hour’s pay, which is mental.

So often when fashion brands talk about the people who make their clothes, the tone is vaguely condescending and a chance for brands to pat themselves on the back, in part because wages are often a talking point. Is that something you’re cognizant of when talking about the people who make Community Clothing?

Over the last 15 years, we have been really good at celebrating individual craftspeople and the things they make and the way they make them. In our industry, tailors on Savile Row have been broadly celebrated, but also the guy that makes the knife that takes him 25 hours. He hand forges the blade and polishes it and all that stuff.

But what we’ve been really bad at is celebrating how good the jobs are that are done by those people that work as part of a factory system. Every person in that chain is doing a highly skilled job and they are a crucial part of that entire organism. If we want it to have a future, we have to be able to attract young people to these careers. We’re talking about great careers for people that will last them their entire lifetime, that will be really rewarding. All of this stuff is really important. We want to celebrate the people.

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Are you concerned that shoppers are going to think chinos sold for $70 aren’t going to last?

People do assume that cheap clothes are cheaply made. On the whole, they’re right. What we have to do, of course, is educate our customers. When they buy them and they wear them, they know that they’re great quality. The fact is, the jeans that we’re making and selling for £65—I can’t say they’re the same, but they’re really, really similar to jeans that are selling by premium brands between £150 and £250.

So what can we expect from Community Clothing?

Well, the philosophy that I took is that there are several ways to try and make the product affordable for people. We don’t advertise. We don’t gift anything. We don’t do any paid marketing. We don’t give stuff to Instagrammers or pay anybody for promotion. Also, we don’t seasonally redesign our product. We say, ‘Right, we’re going to make a nice pair of chinos. What’s the classic chino?’ We do a classic slim, and eventually we’ll have a standard leg, and then we’ll have a looser leg. Then we say, ‘What’s the best way of making chinos in the factory that we have? What are their capabilities?’ So, we design a product that is simple. We take off the extraneous stuff.

So, you’re producing in the UK, paying fair wages, with quality materials from the same suppliers, and you’re going to keep prices low and consistent. Are you going to make any money?

At the end of the day, we as an organization don’t need to make any money. We’re set up as a manufacturer’s cooperative. What we hope is that all of the factories that we are working with will all make money and thrive and by doing that, be able to grow and be able to invest in new machinery and training. We hope that we can help them to grow, partly by providing them with the assurance that there will be regular, well-paid work for the factory. That gives them the confidence that they will be able to start investing and grow their businesses again.

The objective here is to help rebuild an industry—parts of it, at least. I think the potential is there for it to be considerably more significant than just a UK idea. It has grown pretty quickly from a tiny thing to a slightly less tiny thing, but it still has a long way to go. So, fingers crossed.