Handmade History, Episode 8: Flannel
Show Notes
Everyone knows exactly what flannel should look and feel like: It should be plaid and it should be warm and soft.
What is flannel?
- It’s a woven fabric that can be made out of cotton, wool, or synthetic fibers. It is traditionally dyed in a plaid pattern, but it doesn’t have to be. You can have a plain flannel shirt that isn’t plaid. And it has been finished with a process called napping, which we’ll talk about, which is what makes it so soft.
- Originally made from wool
Origin of the word: unknown
- Earliest use: appears in a list of belongings of Elizabeth of York (England) in 1503: “yerds of fflanell”
- A second reference in England: a statue in 1606 stating flannel can be made of “flox, thrumes, or lambes wool”
- Floxe = flax?
- Thrumes = wool (this is speculation, but today thrums are bits of roving or unspun wool)
- Lamb’s wool
- The French used the word “flannelle” in the 1600s
- Germans absorbed it into their language in 1700s “flanell”
- Some people have speculated that the origins of this word are Welsh, because the Welsh became associated with flannel
- The word for wool in Welsh is “gwlân”, goo-lan
- “Flannel” in Welsh is “gwlanen”, goo-lan-en
How old is flannel?
- Very old!
- Though uses of the word date to the 1500s and later, there is evidence that it was made in Europe and traded even earlier
- From an article on the Royal Weavers of Benin, a country in West Africa
- A king, Oba Ewware, is said to have introduced ododo, a ceremonial red flannel cloth
- The oral tradition is that Ewware visited Olokun, the god of the great water in a real place, Ughoton, and got the cloth
- Ughoton later became a European trade port
- So this seems to possibly describe a real interaction where a king from Benin traded for flannel cloth with a European
- This king lived before 1486, so it’s likely flannel has been around and traded with Africa since before then
- Flannel being good enough to trade in 1486 implies that it had been made for much longer beforehand.
Flannel & Wales
- Flannel has historically been associated with Wales
- Wales is a tiny country that is part of the United Kingdom
- It’s on the western side of England, closer to Ireland
- A source of coal
- Very rugged and mountainous
- Also has a lot of grasslands
- According to the National Wool Museum, “Wool was historically the most important and widespread of Wales's industries”
Flannel factories in Wales
- The flannel trade in Wales began on self sufficient farms but grew into a local industry
- Article in the Economic Journal from 1914:
- “At the close of the 18th century, practically all Welsh flannel was made in the farmhouses and cottages dotted over the hillside of Central Wales.”
- “The wool was grown in the neighborhood, spun by the women and children on a primitive wheel, and woven on an antiquated loom in a lean-to outhouse. After the piece had been scoured in one of the many fulling-mills [fulling is a process of washing and shrinking to make the fabric thicker and more waterproof], it was tentered in the neighboring rack-field, and then carried on horseback to the Welshpool market, unless the weaver wished to deal directly with the consumer, in which case he crossed the English border and hawked it from house to house and village to village until it was all disposed of.”
- (Kind of like people selling brooms at this same time in New England)
- Shift to factories the 1800s - part of industrialism
- Article on the flannel trade from 1838 describes the process at this time
- People worked in factories together and were paid by the piece
- They would work 12 hours a day in winter, 14 in summer
- There was a 2-hour lunch break, so I think this would be like 2 6-hour shifts or 2 7-hour shifts
- Factories provided the looms
- Workers brought their own wool, which they processed at home
- Division of labor: men were weavers, women and children did wool preparation and spinning
- The cost of bobbins (for holding the yarn while it was woven) and candles to see by were deducted from the weavers’ wages
- Thin profit margins, especially for flannel made from coarser wool (it came out rougher and could only be sold cheaply)
- There was an apprentice system. When a weaver was learning, they were paid ¾ of the standard wages for the first 16 pieces that they made–then they earned full wages
- One piece = 40 walls, 1 wall = 12 feet 10 inches
- 1 piece = 513 feet 4 inches
- Most of this flannel was sold in England
Changes in the flannel economy of Wales
- In 1832, flannel market moved from Welshpool to Newton
- In 1850, power looms were introduced
- This led to larger factories
- The entire flannel economy declined in the late 1800s
- The market in Newton closed in the 1880s
- Reasons: customer base was in England, and flannel was also produced in England
- Quote: “The Welsh mills competed with the English at every point”
- Raw materials
- Sale of products (why go to the market in Wales to buy flannel if you can stay in England?)
- Labor
- “Many of [the weavers] were brought into the Principality from the outside” - meaning there was a labor shortage, and immigrant workers were often making this flannel in the larger factories
- There was a fire at the largest mill in the country, the Cambrian Flannel Company, in 1889
- It was rebuilt three years later as a leather factory
- The railway, which was expected to help Wales export flannel, actually ended up doing the opposite–it brought cheap flannel to Wales
Flannel’s lasting popularity
- Flannel is warm and soft for a few reasons
- First, it’s often woven from “loosely spun yarn,” which means there’s a lot of air in the fibers. Trapped air keeps you warm
- Second, it is napped
- This is a process that uses “fine wire bristles to distress fiber, making it softer”
- Flannel can be made from worsted or woollen yarns.
- Worsted yarns are made from longer fibers, and they make a smoother cloth
- Woolen yarns are airier and make a fuzzier cloth
“The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit”
- In the mid-century in the US, the three-piece flannel suit was a class marker
- A lot of the following information comes from a very interesting website made by Matt Spaiser, who co-wrote a book called From Tailors with Love: An Evolution of Menswear Through the Bond Films
- Aka James Bond
- The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was a novel by Sloan Wilson, published in 1955 - not James Bond
- Movie starring Gregory Peck in 1965
- “The grey flannel suit represents the average and conformist American post-war middle class working man”
- It was actually kind of necessary at this time to wear pants, a vest, and a jacket while working in big buildings. They weren’t well heated and people were cold
- James Bond wore flannel suits in many of his films
- This shows that he blends in–he looks like everyman in the mid-century
LL Bean Flannel
- Very popular shirt
- The first one was sold in a catalog in 1921: Guide Shirt.
- Cost $5 or roughly $88 today (it costs $49.95 or $74.99, depending on the shirt, so it is cheaper to us today)
- There were 6 colorways
- The Rob Roy, red and black check, was popular
- Shirts are now made in Portugal
- Cotton flannel
- Brushed (napped) 8 times
American Giant
- This American company tried to make a flannel shirt in the US
- Article in the NY Times traced the process
- They succeeded; a tough part was finding a company to do the napping well and make it soft enough
- It costs $168
- Stephen Kurutz wrote a book about this whole process called American Flannel
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Sources:
https://archive.org/details/textilesinameric00mont/page/n1/mode/2up
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Flannel
https://www.athm.org/fabric/flannel/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/style/made-in-america-flannel-shirt.html
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2338067
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2221998
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41347165
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3335344
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3335344
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/flannel_n?tab=factsheet#4329281
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683042
https://www.bondsuits.com/james-bond-the-man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit/
https://www.etymonline.com/word/flannel
https://books.google.com/books?id=qC0FAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA281#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://history.powys.org.uk/history/llani/flan10.html
https://www.llbean.com/llb/shop/518481?nav=C11t518481-517561
https://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/thrumfaq.html
https://www.britannica.com/place/Wales
https://museum.wales/wool/about/
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1921?amount=5
https://www.american-giant.com/pages/american-flannel
Book: American Flannel by Stephen Kurutz (affiliate link)