A material difference
The Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant talks to Stephanie Smith about his mission to make brilliant and affordable British fashion while bringing back our manufacturing pride.
PATRICK GRANT is wearing his own Community Clothing Camera trousers pretty much every day at the moment. They came about because of The Great British Sewing Bee, the BBC One reality show he has presided over as judge since it began in 2013. “One of the cameramen was wearing a pair of Japanese workwear trousers that I really liked, so I took a couple of pictures and we did our own version,” he says. The 2024 series, expected to air in late spring, is done and dusted, having been filmed last year at Sunny Bank Mills at Farsley in Leeds. “Things pop up that really surprise and delight me, and I think, well, that’s such a nice idea. I can take a bit of that and bring it into my own work.”
Patrick’s own work, his day job, is Community Clothing, which sells British-made designs – jeans and utility trousers, knitwear, jackets, coats, socks, dresses, shirts and more – for a fraction of the price of other premium brands.
But Community Clothing is much, much more than a brand. He founded it after receiving an email telling him that one of his valued suppliers, Cookson & Clegg, a Blackburn clothing mill established in 1860, was about to close with the loss of 60 jobs. So he bought it and set about thinking how to save other textile and clothing jobs. In 2016, following a crowdfunding campaign, Community Clothing was born and now works with 45 factories across the UK.
There are two fundamental CC goals, Patrick says. “The first one is to create and sustain jobs in the UK textile-making regions, of which Yorkshire is probably the biggest, alongside neighbouring Lancashire, the Scottish Borders and the Midlands.
“Even 50 years ago there were 1.5 million people employed in textiles, and now there are less than 100,000,” he says. “Within my lifetime we have lost a million and a half really good jobs, jobs where people worked with their hands and their minds. People of all backgrounds, all academic abilities, had something to do that was meaningful and economically sustainable and gave them a sense of pride and structure to their lives, and that is so fundamentally important to the way we rebuild our country, because I think it is fairly broken at the moment.”
These mills were connected with the community, as some still are, like A Hainsworth, which makes fabrics for Community Clothing. Patrick says: “If we buy everything from Amazon, where does that money go? Virtually none of it comes back into our local economy and almost none of it into our national economy.”.
The second CC goal is to make quality clothes that people can afford. “Most clothing businesses operate on a model where, if something costs a tenner to make, they will sell it for £55,” Patrick says. “At the designer end of the clothing world, it’s more like, if it costs a tenner, they sell it for £100. We make