At the Lee Ann Fashion Group’s plant in Leicester, a sheet of floral jacquard print jersey emerges from a large digital printer. The fabric has already been woven on one of the factory’s cylindrical machines with thousands of needles.
About 14 miles away, in the group’s manufacturing division in Hinckley, the same fabric is being laser cut into the pieces for a dress in Marks and Spencer’s Best of British range. These will then be made up by the nearby team of 55 sewing machinists, ready to hit stores at the end of September.
“We are weaving, dyeing, printing and making, all in the UK. This is probably as close as you are going to get to being made in Britain,” says Harvi Johal, joint managing director of the company his father founded in the 1970s to stone wash denim.
M&S’s Best of British range – made in the UK from British materials – underlines the trend for high street retailers to source within the country, as they seek to emphasise provenance and costs in China soar.
Fat Face, the casual fashion chain, has had a British Heritage collection for three years. Others are making more of their collections in the UK, or using British fabrics – Jigsaw sources tweed from a factory in Cumbria that supplies Chanel, while Burberry has used Nottingham lace made on Victorian machines.
Next month, retailer Karen Millen will launch a range of coats tailored primarily in London. The collection builds on the work of its “atelier”, where 33 people in its Shoreditch office translate designs into garments.
Mike Goldstone, who began as an apprentice tailor in Walthamstow in east London when he was 16, takes the sketches produced by Karen Millen’s designers, and turns them into the patterns for coats and tailored jackets, which can have up to 90 different pieces.
A few metres away, Wendy Skimmings machines together the patterns – with the briefest of instructions – that have been developed by Mr Goldstone and other pattern cutters specialising in areas such as draped dresses.
“Its like a jigsaw puzzle,” she says of the most complex designs that can take several days to make up.
The atelier usually develops garments that are made in Europe and China. But the Tailored in London range has been manufactured by two factories in the capital. Quantities range from just 11 units to 200 – dictated by the amount of available fabric – with prices up to £899 for tailored coats.
Gemma Metheringham, creative director of Karen Millen, says the prices reflect the collection’s design quality and Italian fabrics, but also that it is more expensive to manufacture in the UK.
Belinda Earl, style director at M&S, for whom the UK is the seventh-biggest supply region, says the prices of the Best of British range – from £19.50 for a leather cuff to £349 for a wool coat – reflect the costs.
British manufacturing is strongest at the premium end of the market, she adds.
But now in its third season, Best of British also features the £59 jersey dresses made by Lee Ann. This includes the jacquard, which was inspired by a 1970s tea dress in the M&S archive, and another dress in a bright red and blue print with 21 panels that is being hand pressed for distribution.
There is another element to the return to UK manufacturing: speed to market for fashion chains.
When New Look found kimono jackets flying off the rails, it ordered extra stocks from China, and also from factories around Leicester.
“When you see a trend emerging, you don’t want to put all your money behind it,” says Anders Kristiansen, chief executive of the fashion chain, which sources about 7 per cent of its clothing from the UK.
An initial order may be 50,000 or 100,000 units, but when the trend starts to take off “you need to be all over it. That is where the UK has helped us”, he says, adding the company has now sold 1m kimonos.
“There is a trade-off between price, speed and flexibility,” says Sir Philip Green, whose Arcadia group makes a small percentage of its clothes in the UK.
The cost differential between manufacturing in the UK and Asia varies, he says. While UK labour costs are higher, the absence of shipping and duty expenses, currency and stock holding risks makes British sourcing “very worthwhile”.
Ms Earl says one of the biggest barriers to producing garments quickly is the availability of fabric. In Hinckley, many of the machinists are sewing seams or putting zips into a dress for M&S’s Autograph range. In the Leicester plant, rolls of the floral digitally printed fabric are ready to be made up, enabling the dress that became a best seller after appearing in Vogue to be repeated in just four weeks.
Another barrier to making clothes in Britain is the skills base.
“It’s an uphill struggle finding people, but its not a mountain,” says Kim Knowles, Lee Ann’s commercial director. At the Hinckley site, three generations of one family work as sewing machinists, the youngest, Charlotte Hurst, is 18.
Finding the right skills was not a problem for Antler, the luggage company. Making suitcases these days is far less about cutting and stitching and more about engineering. So Antler turned to an automotive component factory in Rutland, trained in suitcase making by one of its Chinese suppliers.
Lee Ann, which has been working with M&S for about 10 years, is now expanding, increasing its sewing machinists to 100. This is in line with the volume of garments more than doubling over the past couple of years, primarily because of Best of British.
“We have an awful lot of dresses to get done over the next five to six weeks,” Mr Johal says.