In My View by Eric Musgrave: Home thoughts from abroad

The recent local government elections gave a telling view of how the great British electorate is viewing the Labour government’s unedifying performance since its landslide victory last July. Losing the parliamentary seat of Runcorn and Helsby to Reform by just six votes was the bitter cherry on a stodgy cake – the Labour majority in 2024 in the constituency had been almost 15,000.

I suspect British manufacturers in our sector are as disillusioned as the many thousands who voted for other parties (apart from the Tories, obviously) in late April or did not vote at all.

I was told recently that the current view of Labour among British textiles, clothing and footwear manufacturers is along these lines: “The last lot just ignored us and didn’t talk to us. This lot talk to us then ignore what we say anyway.”

Rachel Reeves – still chancellor of the exchequer at the time of writing! – did not cover herself with glory in early April when she batted away calls for a Government-backed “Buy British” campaign as a response to Trump’s mad tariff impositions by saying: “In terms of buying British, I think everyone will make their own decisions. What we don’t want to see is a trade war, with Britain becoming inward-looking, because if every country in the world decided that they only wanted to buy things produced in their country, that is not a good way forward.”

I actually agree with her on the general point because such campaigns soon run out of steam but implying that supporting home producers in any way is “inward-looking” was, to put it mildly, a poor choice of words.

Personally I’d like to see much more looking inward by lots of people, from government ministers to regular consumers, so they can see what good stuff still is produced here – for the time being at least.

On this subject, it is of no conciliation to be reminded that every major country in Europe has suffered the same sort of reduction in domestic manufacturing as has the UK. Some, proportionately, have lost more than we have.

I was reminded of French former glories last month when I made a flying visit to Alsace on the border with Germany to visit the Velcorex plant, which produces corduroys as well as a range of flat fabrics for casualwear.

In French corduroy is called velours côtelé – literally ribbed velvet – so the company’s name is an abbreviation of “velours côtelé rex” or “king of corduroy”. The area of the valley of the River Thur was a powerhouse of the once-huge French cotton fabrics industry, but a trip there now is like a visit to the empty former mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire (but with better food).

Back in the early 1980s, when it was part of the sprawling DMC textile conglomerate, the Velcorex mill produced an astonishing 50m metres of high-quality cloth a year, despatching it all over the world. These days output is below 2m metres and the company exists as what we would call a workers’ cooperative, having been rescued from bankruptcy (not for the first time) about three years ago.

The generous host for my visit to the foothills of the Vosges Mountains was Clémence Royer-Cachot, who came to the firm as an intern studying chemical engineering 10 years ago, caught the textiles bug and has ended up as CEO of the newish concern.

I wonder how many UK textile companies are guided by an enthusiastic 34-year-old woman.

Obviously low-cost imports from faraway countries like China and Pakistan are Velcorex’s biggest challenge but in Clémence and her 70 or so colleagues I found the passion and belief in the craft of textile manufacturing I see in their British counterparts every time I visit a mill or a factory at home.

Sadly no corduroy is manufactured in the UK anymore. The biggest domestic supplier – Lancashire-based Brisbane Moss – has its best products made in Italy, a country that has a handful of corduroy specialists still creating what the locals term il velluto a coste – ribbed velvet once again.

I am off to Italy in May to see more corduroy manufacturing in action, courtesy of the firm Duca Visconti di Modrone. It is a fascinating and highly specialised process, helpfully explained on many YouTube videos. All this activity is because I am in the middle of a major project on corduroy and I’d be grateful if readers of this column would share with me any thoughts, opinions , memories, ideas or images about this peculiar cloth.

As a consumer, when and how have you worn it? What brands do you associate with corduroy? If you are a textile designer, have you ever worked on it? If you are a clothing designer, have you enjoyed working with it, and why or why not? If you are a retailer, who well do you sell cordoroy? And you have any favourite images of corduroy in action?

Do please drop me an email on eric@ericmusgrave.co.uk.

Funnily enough, the first thing I learned when I began my research is that the old story of the cloth being the cord du roi, or the cloth of medieval French kings, is discredited these days. More popular is the idea that the name was invented by English weavers in the late 1700s who had a new ribbed cloth to sell to European customers.

Having the right name is very important in marketing, isn’t it?