We’ve written about Original Madras Trading Company before. Manish did an article last year explaining the history of the company – including its much larger manufacturing parent – and how it has resurrected hand-loomed madras in India. 

But there’s nothing quite like seeing it in person for the significance to come home. 

I’m writing this on a Wednesday evening, sitting on a balcony of my hotel in Chennai (previously Madras) having spent the day at the company’s campus with the founder Prasan and his father, Ranvir (above). We spent the day touring the archive, seeing the weaving, but most significantly talking to the people involved.

The gentleman below is Pasupathy. He was the technical specialist Prasan hired to get the hand-weaving project off the ground back in 2016. Pasupathy knew hand-weaving because he was raised in a village where everyone wove at home – about 300 homes. They wove in the winter when they couldn’t farm, in a similar way to those weaving Harris Tweed thousands of miles away. 

Pasupathy was raised by his grandfather, who was one of those weavers. But the trade was dying out and Pasupathy went away to study textiles, before becoming a fabric supervisor at a big clothing factory. 

When he was approached by Original Madras, almost 20 years later, the number of active weavers in the village was down to one. The idea of bringing back this craft in a more organised setting was therefore something Pasupathy was excited about.

“The issue at the beginning was people,” he says. “We could get the looms – they were still around – but we couldn’t convince anyone to come and work for us because it seemed like a risky thing to do. Who was trying to start up this old trade again?” 

Pasupathy and Prasan eventually convinced two women from the village to come work for them, and once it was started, it was easier to convince others. 

“The problem then became one of consistency and speed,” he says. “It took so long to get people used to the rhythms and the patterns.” Their first order was for 400 metres and it took them 150 days. Now they make 150-200m a day.

“My family come down and see what we’re doing here, and they’re so proud,” Pasupathy says. The operation is still tiny compared to the shirt manufacturing next door, but it has expanded to 30 people. 

As Manish explained in that original article, the family company (called PS Apparel, ironically) has been around for 50 years and historically made shirts for a lot of household American names – Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers etc. 

It’s smaller now, but it’s also become more specialist, making more varied and interesting shirts for smaller brands. We can’t mention any current clients, but there’s a lot of embroidery and pattern going on, and a lot of newly fashionable names. 

The archive (below) is huge, with triple-stacked racks looping in corridors of shirts and cloth around a big warehouse. They’ve been good at preserving designs over the past 50 years, and quite a few designers come to trawl it for inspiration. 

The campus employs over 300 people and includes a creche, gardens, plus its own Saturday song-and-dance night. It’s 90% women, and the company helps a lot of them with financial independence – insisting on paying into personal bank accounts, for instance, and helping employees set those up.  

In fact the family’s various projects probably deserve a story all of their own, given they include a large pickle business (run by Prasan’s older brother), a theatre festival started by Ranvir, and various other projects.

Ranvir is also a collector of traditional crafts, including textiles – while we were there he agreed to take on a small collection of Ganesh statues (negotiated in the car while giving us a tour of the city) and showed us his latest acquisition, an ancient ‘tree of life’ illustration (below). 

From a Permanent Style reader’s point of view though, the real action is over in the hand-looming shed. That’s where a product is being produced that’s truly beautiful, a menswear tradition, and increasingly rare.

The first thing you notice is the sound, a loud clacking created by each weaver pulling down the wooden bar on their loom. Each of the weavers has their own rhythm, and they’re subtly different, both in terms of speed and consistency. 

The result is trails of sound that weave in and out of each other – not quite random noise, but not quite conscious rhythm either. 

These are pit looms, so called because each sits in an artificial pit, with the weaver then able to use both their feet and hands. The hands control the bar and the shuttle; the feet create the power.

The last time I saw this hand-weaving was 13 years ago, at Breanish Tweed. That wasn’t a pit loom, but the principle was the same. The weaver was Karen and the loom was called Bertha. 

There are a few different benefits to hand-loomed cloth, but the main ones are the way its speed puts more space into the fabric, giving it a unique, soft feel, and being done by humans gives it natural variation, meaning there are slubs and individual texture to the cloth. It’s laborious and expensive, but distinct.

Prasan has been doing this for a few years, and he’s now in the process of taking things further, by hand spinning the yarn before it is woven. That’s what the lady is doing above. To me, a spinning wheel like that is reminiscent of fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty, which says something about how long it’s been since the practice was common in Europe.

In India, hand spinning has more recent and particularly political significance. Ghandi made it a symbol of emancipation from Britain because spinning in India meant independence from the Empire’s domination of production. That’s why the Indian flag has a spinning wheel on it. 

“Doing the spinning this way means we can produce traditional Khadi cloth, which uses undyed, hand-spun cotton,” says Prasan. “That feels quite special.”

Other new things Prasan is working on include a range using undyed (but machine-spun) yarn, and ones with natural indigo dyes that will fade (in much the same way original ‘bleeding’ madras did). 

He is also planning to offer cloth for sale online, but that’s not ready yet. A lot of readers asked about this after our first article, apparently, so he does want to make it happen at some stage. 

In the meantime, Original Madras cloth is available through the brands they supply and through their own brand. We’re also working on something for PS, which should be available this summer. That will include both finished shirts (made by Luca Avitabile in Naples) and cloth lengths. 

Thank you very much to Prasan, Ranvir and everyone at OMTC. Photography by Jamie Ferguson.