Patrick Grant: Buying Less, But Better

In this episode, I have the immense pleasure of talking with Patrick Grant, a Savile Row tailor, campaigner, TV presenter, and the mind behind several sustainable clothing ventures – his influence has stretched far beyond the cutting table.

The UK was once a textile powerhouse, spinning 70% of the world’s cotton within just a 40-square-mile area. Alongside the rise of a fast fashion culture, this golden era witnessed a dramatic downturn with the loss of countless jobs and an unstable future.

Patrick’s commitment to the industry’s future is evident in his rescue and revitalisation of the Blackburn clothing manufacturer, Cookson & Clegg, where he implemented a more sustainable approach and helped save the factory from closure. He then went on to launch Community Clothing, a sustainable clothing brand that prides itself on using plastic-free materials and being 100% made in the UK.

Takeaways
– How clothes can influence how you feel and think
– The decline of the UK’s textile industry
– The true cost of fast fashion
– Investing in fewer, but higher quality garments can save costs and protect our planet
– The future of the fashion industry.

Chapters
(00:00) The journey to today
(01:32) The common thread of his endeavours
(05:17) The decline of UK textile manufacturing
(10:16) Why Community Clothing is different
(15:31) Marketing is making us buy more
(19:23) Why we’ve lost the skill of repairing clothes
(20:20) Buying less, but better
(25:47) Sustainability in the fashion Industry
(34:21) Transitioning to a Low-Volume, High-Quality Economy
(28:01) The real cost of Fast Fashion
(29:57) Building items that last
(34:25) The future of the Fashion Industry
(36:13) How clothes can influence how you feel and think
(37:59) The 1-minute takeaway

Links:
Visit Community Clothing
https://communityclothing.co.uk/
Visit Norton & Sons
https://nortonandsons.co.uk/
Visit Ben’s Website:
https://bensaunders.com/
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Patrick Grant, so saviour of 150 odd year old British clothing manufacturers, Savile Row tailor, campaigner, TV the Sun newspaper, the Sun, called you TV’s new number one You have forged an impressive path. Now the question is, did you ever think you would end up where you are today.

I didn’t think I’d end up in Blackburn, that’s for sure, but I didn’t think I’d not end up in Blackburn, if I might say that as well. No, I don’t know that I don’t think I ever imagined quite, I don’t think I ever sat

Around and imagined a specific future for myself, but I don’t think that in my wildest dreams, I mean, there have been certain moments where I’m doing something at work and I sort of look up and I think, I’m having dinner with King Charles, or I’m like,

I’m playing Trivial Pursuit with Kate Moss or I’m doing whatever. Like, like things happen and you’re like, how on earth did I end up here? You know, I’m in the back of a cab with Vivian Westwood or like just things that

When I was a kid, you know, all this stuff was a was a was a different world. And actually ending up being in this world and being very much part of this world was certainly not something I expected. You know, as a kid, I was really interested in.

Making stuff in science and in engineering. And I, you know, I did my A levels and did my undergraduate degree and all that. When it funny enough, I’m sort of going back full circle back round to that, because now what I do is much more about engineering and manufacturing and all the

Rest of it for a spell 20 years or so I was flouncing around in London doing sort of fashiony stuff. And yeah. I mean, I didn’t ever think I wouldn’t be doing it, but it certainly wasn’t what I imagined.

And I guess from the outside in, it might look like a sort of constant process of career reinvention Has there been a common thread through all of these endeavors? Well, I think there is a common thread through everything that I’ve ever done.

And I think when I first started, I did science and engineering as A levels and at university and then I worked in manufacturing for a number of years. And everywhere that I worked was, were businesses that were concerned with doing things as well as they possibly could.

And wherever I was, you know, whether it was engineering a piece of cable, or I worked, you know, during my year in France, during my Erasmus year, I did a work placement at a ceramic tile factory in Portugal and I worked at a brewery in Hartlepool in my year in industry.

And wherever I worked, I was always in businesses that really tried to make good things. And then when I started, when I switched from working in engineering and manufacturing that kind of world to working on Savile Row, which I did when I was 34, I can’t remember, 2005, 33.

I think I met you not long after Obviously what Norton and Sons stood for, well at the time it didn’t stand for very much, but what I made it stand for was a deep care with only making the very best things, making them in the very best way, using the very best materials.

So going back to all the things that I’d always learnt at university and in my previous career, which was try always to do something that’s really, really going to work fantastically well in all situations and work for a really long time and give people a lot of great enjoyment in using it.

And that was the case at Norton’s. It was certainly the case at E. Tautz where we started to do ready-to-wear and I went out and I found a network of amazing British factories that all made extraordinary stuff and all were staffed by people who really, really deeply cared about making good things.

When I bought Cooks and Clegg, which is where I am today in Blackburn, they were a manufacturer who had manufactured for about 160 odd years, they’d made good stuff. And for the last 70 odd years of their existence, they’d been a military clothing manufacturer.

So they had made stuff that literally was life or death for the people for whom they made it. And then community clothing has all of that same stuff in it. So it is about trying to make really, really good things that people really like wearing and making them in a

Way that does the minimum amount of harm when it’s produced and does the minimum amount of harm when people have finished using it. And in the case of our clothes now, you know, hopefully just as it is with Norton’s and it was with Tautz these clothes last a really, really long

Quality has been at the heart of everything that I’ve done. You know, a consistent thread throughout everything has been an endeavor to do things in an uncompromising way and in a way that delivers not only great quality but great value to people. I mean, community clothing is extraordinary value.

& Sons is bloody expensive, but it’s still actually really good value because the stuff all, you know. Well, I purchased precisely one suit from Norton Suns. And I think when we first met, you said, when Lord Carnarvon opened Tutankhamen’s tomb with Meryn Yorton and there’s a whole list of other illustrious explorers and

Like, we should make one for you Ben And I think you said, oh, we’ll do it, you know, kind of mates rates, you know, heavy discount. And I can’t remember the number now, but I think I fell off my chair. I was pretty broke.

But I did come back a couple of days later, I’d landed a couple of sponsors and things, but feeling a bit more flush and had a suit made. And. I’m convinced this thing will outlive me. I mean, Blashford Snell had that sort of amazing explorers jacket made.

I mean, that thing will last 200 years. I mean, it was made out of the most bomb-proof, I mean, how you, how we ever wore it in, you know, Panama and places like that. I mean, it’s like a 24-ounce tweed but you know, it’s made of tough stuff.

And you mentioned Cooks and Clegg 2015, you saved it from closure. To me, as a kind of Philistine outside, obviously I… wear clothes like most people, but I don’t know a lot about the industry. It strikes me that the UK used to be this sort of textile manufacturing powerhouse

And it’s almost gone full circle from cottage industry, literally pre-industrial revolution to cottage industry all over again. Like what happened? Yeah, I mean, it’s a really fascinating arc actually. I mean, we were a textile powerhouse. We were a textile powerhouse for all sorts of interesting reasons.

I mean, some good reasons and some bad reasons, but we were an early powerhouse in clothing because we had wool. And so we had good wool and we made a lot of money out of wool in the sort of 13th, 14th and 15th centuries.

We were also a place that was very open to immigration. So we managed to allow people like the Huguenots and others who fled Europe as refugees, came to us as refugees, who brought an amazing amount of different skill. to our textile industry in lots of different areas.

Lots of fine spinning, lots of jacquard weaving, lots of silk weaving, all sorts of different things. We also had a fairly unique setup because we had early guilds and the guilds kind of established a criteria for quality that everybody had to uphold.

And also we established a certain amount of competition between different guilds. So I think at one stage there were three different sort of guilds or guild equivalents that were all managing textile and they all competed against one another and of course that meant that they all had to really, really do their best.

And so we got to a point where we were really pretty big in textiles and we were entirely self-sufficient in textiles until really the sort of early 18th century when we started to import cotton in big quantities. we then went through the industrial revolution

By our own ingenuity, we managed to develop all of the kits that really, really transformed the production of high quality, high volume text or higher volume textiles. And at the same time, because of our excellence in colonization and global

Wielding of brutal power, we managed to grab hold of the supply of cotton that we needed to feed the industry that we had. And at one point in time, we made almost 70% of all the world’s cotton textiles in this country, in an area that’s about 40 miles around where I’m sitting today.

I mean, it was the most extraordinary period in history. Like this tiny little area made most of the world’s cotton textiles. But we also still had a big wool textile industry and still a reasonable sized linen industry. And then everyone else kind of caught up.

Most of the world’s high quality cotton used to be made in India. And it was grown, obviously cotton grows in subtropical climates, doesn’t grow here. So all those places like India, China and the Ottoman, former Ottoman Empire, they were making cotton textiles and the Indians were making the best stuff.

And we would buy it from them and then eventually we worked out how to make the machines that made it much quicker. So we undercut the Indians for about a century and a half. And then they bought the machinery that we made, and then they undercut us.

And, you know, and Gandhi came to Blackburn and stuck two fingers up at the British weavers and said, well, you might be starving now, but you’ve, you starved us, for a century and a half. So what goes around comes around, lads.

But what happened in the, in the latter part of the 20th century was that we kind of gave up on quality and we, as a nation of consumers, we became more interested in buying high volumes of stuff at low cost than about the quality of things in

You know, we got much better machinery, much more automated machinery. And eventually that stopped making a big enough increase in profit. then the businesses started to move those factories overseas. And then literally millions of people lost their at one point in time in the UK, one in five jobs were in textiles.

In fact, more than that, one in five jobs were in cotton textiles. More than a fifth of the population made clothes. Yeah, I know exactly what it is today. I mean, I don’t know in a percentage terms, but. We, about 50 years ago, there were 1.6 million people making textiles and

Clothing in the UK, and today it’s less than 100,000. And we buy five times as many pieces of clothing, and we spend a third less. So our clothes are incredibly cheap compared to what they were 50 years ago, and we don’t even use half of them.

In fact, statistically, we only use a third of them. So we buy so much cheap stuff. By buying all this cheap stuff, we’ve killed a million and a half really good skilled jobs, and we don’t even wear the stuff we buy.

And in fact, a third of all the clothes produced on the planet every year don’t even get sold. 2022 we made 100 billion pieces of clothing, 70% of them made with oil-based synthetics and a third of those never even got sold. Straight to landfill or incineration. It’s utterly mental.

It now feels inevitable that you ended up in Blackburn, do still have all the very best bits of that textile industry. So the textile bits that are left are the phenomenal quality ones because it’s easy for people to copy low quality stuff.

So all of these countries around the world, that, you know, also cotton textiles are much easier to make than woolen textiles. and linen textiles. So cotton is easy. I mean, synthetics are really easy by comparison. But what is left in this country is the really, really good stuff.

And community clothing, everything we’ve ever sold, and we’ve been going now since 2016, everything we’ve ever sold has been made in the UK. Most of it is made with UK-made textiles. But we work with 45 factories now in the UK, and they’re all bloody amazing.

And lots of them make for lots of other… really expensive brands like Burberry and Hermes and Louis Vuitton and Prada and all these great brands and us and Chanel. I was in the factory the other week at the place that makes our jumpers and there’s

Like Chanel knitwear going down one line and there’s community clothing down the other, which makes me feel like and we sell ours for like 80 quid a jumper. So we work with 45 factories now, and those factories in total employ around about 1,900 people.

So it’s not a huge…but it’s like 2% of the entire national infrastructure in textiles and clothing, which is pretty good for a tiddly little brand that’s kicked off five years ago with no money. we’re trying to do is encourage people to look differently at their clothes. So we do only use…

Natural materials, we try and make clothes that really last. We’re not trying to sell you the reason we’re called clothing and not fashion is because there is a real difference between clothing and fashion. Clothing is driven by need, fashion is driven by want, and our whole ethos is,

The way to solve this catastrophic environmental problem in clothing is to stop buying as much stuff. Like you can tinker around with the materials all you like. You know, you can do… you can… you know, you can do leather made out of mushrooms until the cows come home, but

It’s going to make just a fucking knats Sorry, excuse my French. It’s going to make an absolute knats whisker worth of difference. a Blackburn definition. Yeah, but the way to do this is to stop buying as much and the stuff you do buy,

Make sure that it is much lower I’ve just written a book about all of this sort of stuff. And one of the things I do is I chart the kind of evolution of consumption. And for the first 30,000 years of our existence, we muddled along with almost nothing.

And you know it wasn’t like everyone for the first 30 000 years of human existence was miserable that’s clearly not the case up until around the sort of early 16th century we were systematically told to not buy anything like you know it is our duty as good citizens of the world to live

Quietly with nothing to not be envious, to not be greedy. These were mortal sins. Religious and moral philosophers and all of our leaders said, don’t buy stuff, folks, just be happy with what you’ve got. And then at some point in time, they suddenly woke up.

Really, it was the point at which capitalism sprung up as an ideal and became well codified. Suddenly, all the people with money realized that if they could make more stuff and make us buy more stuff and keep that cycle going, they’d all get much richer.

So suddenly all of that stuff where they were telling us not to buy anything and it was ungodly to want things and envy was a bad thing, absolutely go for it lads. We’re going to make you buy as much stuff as we can possibly get you to put your

Hand in your pocket for. And it was a complete switch. And now, and for the last 300 years, that kind of the sophistication and the frequency with which we are sold things has ratcheted up and up and up and up and So the volume, particularly in my industry, clothing, you know, they are,

Everybody’s selling you stuff. You’ve got kids in schools influencing their peers on TikTok you’ve got shopping being kind of gamified by people like Temu and Shein and those other brands because it’s so cheap, it’s become a completely thoughtless, unconsidered a new top is less than the price of a cup of coffee.

So why should I think twice? I’ll just have it. And if it’s rubbish, who cares? I’ll just put it in the bin and move on. that apparatus of consumption and driving consumption is so powerful and strong now. And so many big businesses make so much money out of it.

That it’s really, really hard for anybody to shake themselves free. But what’s interesting is that all of the data around what makes us happy is completely unconnected from the amount of physical things we have. And so the more stuff we buy, the more hooked on consumption we get.

I mean, statistically in the UK over the last 50 years, we have got… no happier. We’ve got 10 times richer as a nation, but on average we are not one bit happier. And in America actually they are less happy now than they were 60 years ago.

The two long solo expositions I did, and they were quite a way apart. The first was 2004, 20 years ago. 26 years old, which now feels absurdly young. I spent 10 weeks, 72 days on my own on the Arctic Ocean. And interestingly, I was only wearing one set of clothes.

I think I changed my underwear. handful of times, but I’m not convinced I even had a mirror. I was maybe I had a tiny one just checking I hadn’t got frostbite on my face, but I couldn’t. And it struck me, I sort of during that experience, part of me, I think became a

Bit of a hippie and I live quite close to Stroud now. So maybe like you and Blackburn, we sort of gravitate towards it. But I remember sort of concluding after that journey and even more so The last big solo trip was 2017, 2018.

So much more recently, that’s a couple of months in Antarctica on my own. But I’ve, with both of those trips, I thought that that’s probably the longest I’ve ever gone without being marketed to. I didn’t have a phone. I didn’t have an internet connection didn’t see my emails, didn’t, there was

No, there’s no, no telly, no, nothing, no civilization. you know, not once did I think. the sorts of thoughts that one might think in back in the civilized world. Now, I’m not, you know, I’m like all of us are sort of conflicted and flawed human beings.

We’re all sometimes succumb to these urges, but I think that is okay. I don’t want to stop fashion. I mean, as a kid I loved fashion and I still love it. There’s certain things about it I still love. And I am drawn to these things.

I’m drawn to the beauty of really nice objects more than I am drawn to some prat on TikTok showing me what they’ve got that day. you know, by clicking and wearing 17 outfits like that. Frankly, I couldn’t give less of a stuff about, but you know, there are still

Wonderful things in the world that are appealing because of their beauty and the craftsmanship and lovely things like that. So I think it’s OK to desire things. I think it’s only natural. But what isn’t natural is to base your entire kind of happiness system on new

Stuff, providing you with a jolt of happiness all the time, because that, I think, feels hopeless. Like, if that is what you’re pinning hope of your future happiness on, you really are in for a rude awakening at some Everyone growing up in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s had more than enough fashion.

We don’t need the volume of fashion we’ve got now, but we’re somehow hooked on it. I’m not, but lots of people sadly are. I mean, I’m like you. I mean, weirdly, so I’ll be writing this book, which is out in May, and I was thinking about what I’d be wearing,

I mean, and I’m wearing them today. These trousers, these are community clothing, cameraman pants. And I got a pair of these as a try on. We were just developing them. These were like the final production samples. And so I got them to wear test them in August.

And I reckon I can count on one hand the number of days that I haven’t worn them since. And there’s a jumper over there that I put on in November. And it’s a bit like the jumper you’re wearing. It’s a heavy gauge rib wall jumper.

I put it on in November and I haven’t taken it off since. I’ve changed the t-shirt underneath. My socks and pants gets changed. But I’ve literally, I always wear it. And I’m wearing, this is one of the community clothing, organic, plastic free

Sportswear tops that I’ve, again, I’m wear testing now, even though we’ve launched it. But you know, I’ve just like, we always want to check things and make sure that they are good. But I wear the same stuff all the time and it actually makes life bloody easy. Like what am I wearing today?

All the stuff I took off and folded up and put on my chair eight hours ago. And you know what? I put it on and I’m like, oh, looks good today, just like it looked yesterday. And off I trundle and I don’t have to worry about it.

And if I’m packing my bag to go anywhere, it’s just a few socks and pants. There’s a lot of data about what makes people happy. But the things that make people happy are hanging out with their friends and family,

Going for a walk, sitting on the top of a mountain with a sandwich and a flask of tea. staring at mountain tops, sitting in the garden listening to the birds chirping. That’s the stuff that makes people happy. Going to a gig, listening to the music, it’s all apart from going to gigs.

Most of it’s free. Most of it’s free and it’s available to all of us. We just go outside and like wander around and we’ll literally feel happier. You know, instead we’re sitting on our phones going mad for buying rubbish off Temu and it’s like, that doesn’t make anyone happy.

One of the one of the skills one of the polar prerequisites, it turns out is, is an ability to sew because stuff just gets trashed. And what is Yeah. So I was like constantly repairing stuff. And then three years later, 2004, always I had a pair of mittens.

I actually auctioned them at some charity, didn’t see it for years, but literally the mittens were in like a glass case. And because they were completely the, one of the thumbs was different color. Cause I had to bodge it up with something else.

And I would sew, um, sew everything up on exhibitions with dental floss, because a cause I had some with me and my teeth. It’s like bomb proof. It just, it just, you know, so that, and, um, so, um, yeah, my, my darning skills, I would say I’ll kind of. rudimentary and entirely functional.

I’m not, you know. but you know, but you know it feels good to fix something, don’t you? Yeah. And I think again, this is one of these things that people have kind of had forgotten about for a long time and now are the reason so many of us watch and

Love the repair shop is because it makes us feel good to fix something. You know, most clothes get considerably worse the first time they’re worn, and then considerably worse the first time they’re washed, and then they fall apart. Whereas good things get better and better and better.

And I did this documentary about uniform for the coronation, and one of the… officers that I spoke to was talking about one of his new recruits, who I think was a 16, 17 year old lad. And he got kitted out for the first time and he pulled his leather boots on and

There was this sort of stunned, like what on earth am I wearing sort of look on his face. And turns out he’d never worn a pair of leather shoes in his entire life. He’d only ever worn trainers. And so the idea of pulling something on and he had the, you know.

This officer had to explain to him that they will get better. Like you’ll polish them, you’ll wear them, you’ll sweat in them, they’ll get wet, they’ll mold to your feet, and they will get more and more comfortable the more you

Wear these things, and you will have them probably for the rest of your life. And he was like sort of stunned by this idea. And that is the case with so many things in our lives. And I love this story of you fixing your mittens.

And again, like other cultures value these things far more. You know, in Japan, you’ve got this idea of borrow. So the more something is fixed and patched, the more valuable it becomes because that becomes part of its story.

Its use, its failure, its repair, all of that becomes, you know, all of that love and skill that goes into fixing and repairing things becomes part of the value of the piece. And we need to learn more of that because it is a genuine pleasure. Like, you know…

You know, when you pull on a really good pair of shoes or that suit from Norton’s, it feels better. And the more you wear it, the better it gets. I wanted to dig into another side of, I don’t think just that business, but I think your factories, plural, wind powered, renewable energy, waste

Business owners like you that they might feel like that is too big of a switch to make right now. It’s not economic. How did you do so at Community Clothing, we don’t own the factories. So we, I mean, it’s a slightly odd position because I am a major shareholder

In Community Clothing and I am the majority shareholder of Cookson and Clegg. So we’re not the same business, but they’re under the same sort of umbrella. But most of the factories that we use are independent of us and are owned by independents. Mostly they’re private, family owned, multi-generational, all the rest of it.

But you know, they all make their own decisions. But we encourage a certain way of behaving. We certainly encourage the use of green energy. You know, I mean, we don’t have our own, annoyingly, I mean, I do like my landlord, but he wouldn’t let us put solar panels on the roof.

And god it annoyed the hell out of I actually saw this really cool wind turbine technology that a lot of small, I can’t remember what they’re called, but they funnel the air. You put them on the edge of a building, and they draw air upwards.

So when the wind blows, they’re sort of like little vertical columns. They’re quite squat. They’re only a few meters. They’re like four meters tall by four meters wide or a couple of meters wide. And lots of people are looking at them now rather than big. You know. traditional kind of wind turbines.

But some of the businesses we work with use entirely renewable energy, and we encourage that. We can’t force it, we can’t mandate it, but we encourage it, and we, one of the things we do, by the way we operate, is we give people the confidence that we are here for the long term.

The people that make our socks, we’ve got orders going forward the next three years on those socks. Like, So we give them the confidence that they can start thinking a bit more long term, because if you’re in an industry that’s been declining for 50 years, it’s very hard to make forward looking steps.

You’re constantly just trying to keep the lights on. But by the way that we operate, we are able to give people the confidence that we’re here for the long run. And things go up and down, but generally, there’s nobody that we have ever started working with. that we no longer work with.

Every factory that we work with, we choose with great care and we give them a long-term vision that we are in it for the long run. But also it’s about traceability. It’s about adhering to environmental standards on the way that they treat their waste. It’s about understanding exactly their entire supply chain.

We can trace quite a lot of our products all the way back to the farm. So that’s on both cotton and on wool. there is a resurgence in artisan manufacturing so that is where the person who makes it sells it to you.

So you’re sort of cutting out the middle man and I think there is there is a lot of movement towards that because again you’re kind of redistributing the value in the economics of it in a much more, for me…

I think the people that make stuff should get more money than the people that sell it. a lot of manufacturers aren’t directly connected with the customer because they sell to a brand and the brand sells to the customer. So they don’t hear what we hear.

We’re standing in pop-up shops and getting emails from customers. And a lot of people are saying the same thing. They want to understand what’s happening in the supply chains of the… products they buy. Now, at the moment that’s a small number of people. There are loads and loads of people who don’t care.

But I think the general direction of travel is, if you think about the sort of broad continuum, there are people that know and have changed their habits. There are people, a bigger number of people that know but haven’t changed their habits, either because they don’t care or they can’t afford to.

And then there’s a huge chunk of people that still, I mean it seems that astonishing to me but still don’t understand the harm that all of this stuff does. But it’s just a question of education and everybody is moving in the same direction.

We’re not going to get to a point in 10 years time where we turn around and say, you know what, I really liked all that organic cotton but what I’d like now is more we are never turning that clock back.

So businesses need to understand there is only one direction of travel and that is towards lower consumption, less harm. more harmony with nature, all of that stuff is the only direction we are going to go in. Because consumers are not going to, nobody’s going to change their mind and

Think I’d like to see more dead turtles please. That is not the way, that is never going to happen. So that is the direction we all need to be heading in. I’m intrigued about where this comes from. Like you have this obvious deep understanding of the sort of legacy, the

Cost, the impact, environmentally, socially of the industry that you’re working in and you’re clearly changing things. But where does that sense of, like what I’m sensing is a real sense of stewardship for the natural world, for people. Where does that? come well, I was outdoors all the time as a kid.

I was very lucky. I grew up in Edinburgh, like across the road was a, what is now a nature reserve called the Hermitage of Braid. And it’s just a great big wooded valley. And as kids, that’s where we were. We were in that place, building dens, damming the river, catching stuff, you

Know, just hanging out in nature. But you know, I had nature books. I had like the, you know, the Lady Bird book of trees. I watched nature documentaries, I watched Life on Earth with David Attenborough, and I watched all this stuff. And I was a member of Edinburgh Zoo.

There was a thing called the Gannet Club Edinburgh Zoo, which we did in the holidays. So we’d go to Edinburgh Zoo, and they’d teach us about animals and wildlife. I just really like it. It makes me really happy. I grew up in an area, so I grew up in Edinburgh.

My grandparents, my granddad worked in the textile industry and then the firm he worked for, actually, he’d finished that before I was old enough to realize what he was doing. But he had worked in the spinning industry and then his job was as the development officer for the Borders.

And the Borders is a region that lost thousands, in fact, probably 40,000 jobs in a period of about 40 years in the textile industry when that went. And it was devastating. And also you can’t fail. I’ve lived in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and now spend a lot of time in Blackburn.

You cannot fail to see the human cost of our change in behavior in terms of the destruction of communities, the loss of livelihoods, the loss of health. the rise in antisocial behavior. I mean, all of this stuff that contributes to the lessening of people’s enjoyment living in these places. I completely agree.

You used a word earlier, uncompromising. And thinking of let’s call them fashion brands, can only make, for trade-offs on quality, price, the way that the people that make the clothes are treated. And it strikes me that you have, I can’t see that you’ve sacrificed anything here. How have you done that?

So the idea behind commuter clothing was born out of a desire to want to sustain and create jobs in the UK textile industry and make good clothes, really good clothes and make them affordable. So that was the baseline that we started with. So the rest of the model was built around delivering that.

So how do you do that? Well, I mean, you go back to the simple principle that if you make something really good and you sell it at a decent price and there’s nothing bad in anything that you do, then if people find out about it and buy it and like it, they’ll come

Back and they’ll buy something else. And that’s the principle. Like what’s not to like about good clothes at a good price that are supporting jobs down the road? And that’s our thing. So we don’t spend money on marketing. We don’t spend money designing new collections.

This training top that I’m wearing now will be in the collection next year and the year after, you know, these trousers will be the same in 15 years time. Like, we don’t have to redesign our clothes. The only reason we redesign clothes every six months or three months or week or day,

Depending on what your business is, is to encourage people to buy more stuff. And we’re not trying to encourage people to buy more stuff. In fact, we’re trying to encourage people to buy less stuff. But the reason that works is there are 66 million people in this country and they

All need some clothing. if even 1% of them buy clothing from us, that’s way more than we can deal with. So we don’t need to be artificially, incentivizing people to buy more we never have a sale. So the price is the same all year round. And it’s the best price we can do.

And so it’s never there’s never a cheap time to buy. We’re never trying to flog you something at the end of the season. So we don’t have all of that. Like, we’ve just simplified it. It’s like it’s good stuff. Good prices. What’s not to like? Amazing.

To read back to you something that was that you did in an interview with the FT recently. You said, we could transform the entire British clothing industry from one that currently produces huge quantities of low value products. by making the UK an economy that consumes very small quantities of very high quality

Product with high quality locally sourced material. You can then create a whole secondary industry that deals with repair. Now you’ve touched on these things already, but this feels like the antithesis to the sort of evil fast fashion industry. But how can we make this generally, as consumers, we have a choice.

We spend, we still spend a fair amount of money on our clothes, but what we can choose to do is to choose to be more thoughtful about how we spend it. And in the back of the book that I’m doing, There’s a list of what I call artisan makers.

So this is companies that make their own stuff and sell it themselves. Which is generally, in my opinion, the way to buy really good stuff. So if a company makes its own product and sells it to you, there’s a fair likelihood

That they’re going to want to do a good job, because it’s probably the only thing they do. And if they don’t do a good job of it, they’re buggered. So you know. And they’re a… There are companies like Aiguille, Rucksacks, and PhD, But they have their

Own factory in Cumbria, and they live and die by making that one thing. And when you buy a thing from them, all the money goes to them. instead of buying 10 cheap things, buy one good thing that you really care about, and

That one good thing will probably last you when you will get more enjoyment, and every time you use it, like you with your egg with rucksack, you’ll think… There’s something great about this. You know, it really works. It’s great quality. And I know where it’s come from.

And I know that the money I spent, you know, they’re not inexpensive rucksacks, but all of that money is going into good materials and highly skilled people that are living and breathing the idea of making good stuff. And that I think is, is what we can all, we can all do.

And I think, you know, there’s no point repairing, like it doesn’t make any economic sense to repair something really cheap. You know, if you’ve bought a top for three quid. It’s going to cost you five quid to like you can like so but if you buy something good, it is worth repairing.

And then like the more we get back into making things, the more skills we have for repairing them. And personally, I think like it’s got to go back to school. Like kids need to kids need to be taught how to make stuff at school because you

Can’t make good judgments about quality if you don’t know anything about how things are made. We have to just be more thoughtful. We have to just take stock. Like give yourself a pat on the back for not buying something.

I did a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society and there’s some of the notes, some of the graphics from that are in the appendix in the book. But it’s like, you can have the same value of industry. You know, the clothing industry in the UK, I can’t remember what the number is, but

It’s in the billions. But you can have an industry that’s exactly the same monetary value, but which has like 20% of the amount of new stuff. And that 20% is actually just good stuff rather than terrible stuff. So we can shift from a high volume, low quality, low value economy to a low

Volume, high quality, high value economy. Like, that’s just a choice we can all make. Some people cannot afford these things. the Terry Pratchett boot parable, you know, the rich man can afford 50 quid on a pair of boots and they last him for 10 years.

The poor man can only afford a 10 pound boot and it only lasts a year. So he spends twice as much in the long run and his feet are always wet. there are people that cannot afford to buy a good pair of socks or a good pair of, you know, a good jumper.

And somehow we’ve got to get over that. Because just… just making them buy more and more terrible quality rubbish is not helping them at all. It’s not helping anybody, and it’s certainly destroying the planet. that needs to be addressed.

But somehow we just, we like, those of us that can’t afford to need to just be more thoughtful. I spent a bit of time recently with some extraordinarily talented young people with Central St. Martin’s universities. In fact, they’ve got two master’s courses one was MA Fashion, and one was a really

Cool course called Material I met someone who’s a glassblower, a philosopher, a poet, like weird and wonderful. And all thinking along remarkably similar lines to you. I mean, even the fashion master students. So I was, I was inspired by that. But my question is what, what makes you excited about the future?

Funnily enough, it is some of the things that you’ve just mentioned. Look, the fashion industry in Britain has always, we’ve had a good fashion industry for a long, long time. And we had a huge textiles and clothing industry, and then we were very big in fashion.

In the 60s and 70s, we were one of the, we’re one of the leading fashion centers of the world, and we always have been. and our universities have always turned out lots of great designers. with great visions. And I think what is really interesting is that if you look at the students leaving

Places like St. Martins and LCF and all the other kind of university of the arts, London colleges and many other great fashion and textile schools in the UK, so many of them now are thinking along different lines.

So many of them are thinking, I can only carry on doing this if I do this in a way that doesn’t kill the And there are so many cool young designers that are making new stuff out of old stuff. And there’s not, you cannot leave one of these colleges now without understanding

The role you play in shaping a less harmful future in terms of the industry that you’re in. But so many cool designers are making stuff out of found objects, recovered textiles, you know, old stuff. And that takes real, not only does it take great creativity, it also takes great skill.

It’s very easy to produce new stuff in a factory from virgin oil-based synthetics. Any idiot can do that. But what takes great skill is to make a highly desirable object made out of old stuff. That takes real creativity and talent. And also the number of young people who are very consciously opting

Out of supporting the fast fashion industry. I mean there are far more that are continuing to support it, but it is a movement. It is becoming uncool to buy fast fashion and that feels very significant. I came across this concept and it’s a term in psychology called enclothed cognition,

The clothes we wear can change our cognition, the way that we think. Now the experiment I believe was not that long ago, 10 years ago. I’m not sure the university, but it was an experiment with white lab coats.

So basically if you wear a white lab coat, you become slightly brainier, a bit of remembering things, doing experiments. But is this something you’ve experienced now? Now you’ve heard this term. And if so, you know, what can you share from your

Clothing has a real power to transform the way we think about ourselves and present ourselves, like physically, you know, you know that putting on the uniform of something makes you feel more like that something, you know, that’s why soldiers

Put uniform on it, it makes them feel, you know, business people put on a suit and they feel more business-like. what is clear is that clothes have a power to do things to our unconscious mind. you can feel differently about yourself based on the clothes that you’re wearing.

And certainly when you feel very comfortable in the clothes you’re wearing, I think it allows you to think in a more generous way. And certainly when you are dressed in a way that you don’t feel comfortable. it diminishes your ability to be yourself and be yourself to the full potential.

So I can see why it’s true. I don’t think I can think of specific examples when it happened. I mean, I did used to wear quite a lot of lab coats in my undergraduate days. And actually, funny enough, we make the lab coats that you have to wear when you

Go to the Rolls Royce factory when you walk around and inspect your car. We make those. Clothing is a fascinating and powerful thing and I’m now going to be very conscious of my clothed, enclothed my enclothed cognition. Yes. Yeah.

If we had to edit this entire podcast down to one minute, what would be your takeaway? And I’m assuming it’s along the lines of sort of buy less, but better. the book I’ve written is called Less, and the subtitle is Stop Buying So Much Rubbish. I’ve done it in one word, just less.

But no, that’s it. I think we can find far more enjoyment in life by having much stronger connections to the things that we live with. I mean, it’s that William Morris idea of not having anything in your house that isn’t either beautiful or useful. And I think that is something we’ve all forgotten.

And I think not only can the way we buy have a positive impact on our own happiness, it can absolutely have a fundamentally positive effect on the happiness of lots of other people who are involved in making it and the happiness and health of the planet. Wonderful. Patrick, it’s been an absolute joy.

Thank you. I’m assuming the best place for if people want to know more that well, we should send them to community clothing if they want something both, both useful and beautiful for their wardrobes. Patrick, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Pleasure, Ben. Thanks so much.