Journal

Part Six: The Trouser
Stitching is where every earlier decision either holds up or falls apart. A cut piece of cloth becomes a wearable trouser here, and this stage has the most opportunities for small errors to compound — a slightly uneven seam allowance, a rushed waistband — into problems you'd actually notice when wearing the finished garment.   Construction starts with the internal structure: darts, pocket bags, and the waistband facing go in before the outer seams are closed, since these are hardest to fix once the trouser is mostly assembled. Front and... Read more...
Part Five: The Cut
Cutting is the point where a flat length of finished cloth stops being fabric and starts being a specific pair of trousers. It's also the point where a mistake is hardest to undo — cloth that's been cut cannot be un-cut. Everything before this stage exists to make sure the person cutting is working with the best possible material, because the margin for error narrows sharply from here on.   We cut against a pattern developed specifically for how SLOOM trousers are meant to fit — not a generic block... Read more...
Part Four: The Cloth
A length of fabric fresh off the loom is not the same fabric that ends up in a finished trouser. What comes off the loom is called greige cloth — unwashed, unfinished, still holding the tension it picked up during weaving. Everything between the loom and the cutting table is about turning that raw cloth into something that behaves the way a trouser should.   The first step is washing. This relaxes the weave, shrinks the cloth to something close to its stable, finished dimensions, and removes any residue left... Read more...
Part Three: The Loom
This is the part of the process that gives SLOOM its name. Once dyed yarn arrives at the mill, it goes onto the loom — and this is where individual threads actually become cloth, warp and weft crossing thousands of times per metre until a length of fabric exists where there was only thread before.   We weave our own cloth rather than buying finished fabric from a supplier, which is unusual for a trouser brand at our size. Most brands work backward from an available roll of cloth. We... Read more...
Part Two: The Dye
Colour is decided before the cloth is woven, not after. We dye yarn in-lot rather than piece-dyeing finished fabric, which means every thread going onto the loom is already the exact shade it needs to be. This is a slower way to work, but it produces a more even, more durable colour than dyeing a finished bolt of cloth.   Yarn-dyeing has a practical advantage too: because the colour runs all the way through each individual thread, it doesn't sit only on the surface. Surface-dyed cloth tends to fade unevenly... Read more...
Part One: The Yarn
Every SLOOM trouser begins as raw cotton yarn, long before it looks like fabric or a finished garment. We source cotton yarn for our mill in Bhilwara, Rajasthan — a region with a long history of textile manufacturing — and the quality of that yarn is the single biggest factor in how a trouser will look, feel, and wear over time.   Yarn is judged on a few things: staple length, twist, and consistency. Longer-staple cotton produces a smoother, stronger thread with fewer loose fibres, which means less pilling and... Read more...
How to measure yourself for a pair of trousers
A 32 here is not a 32 elsewhere. Two measurements, taken properly, settle which size to order. Read more...