Deveaux: Woven Into Wax London

Eleven years on, what started as a small London label has grown collection by collection, into tailoring, denim, outerwear and more. But if there's one piece we're known for, it's the Whiting overshirt.

Since our first Whiting, we've evolved it through new colourways, checks, patterns and fabrications. But it all started with Deveaux. Some suppliers you work with. Others you grow up with. A family-run French mill with more than 200 years behind it, Deveaux still weaves the cloth for most of our Whitings today, including the bestselling Pike, Beatnik and Houndstooth designs. And lately its work has been turning up elsewhere in the collection too.

The Whiting

Not every Whiting is made in Deveaux cloth, but most are, and the cloth is a big part of why it has lasted: weight and character, made to wear in rather than out.

Deveaux's archive runs two hundred years deep, full of cloths not woven in generations. When we start work on a new season of Whitings, it's one of the first places we look.

Years in, the brief barely needs writing. They know what a Whiting should feel like, and every roll of cloth arrives woven to the same exacting standard.

The Whiting isn't the only thing Deveaux makes for us. This season, the mill's cloth has found its way into three more pieces: the Iggy jacquard jacket, the geometric Park jacket, and the Otto overshirt in an ornate navy and brown quilt.

There's something fitting about a London brand getting its cloth from just across the Channel. Two family businesses, both in it for the long run.

The Mill

Deveaux has been weaving in France for over two centuries, and has stayed independent and family-run the whole way through. It holds France's Living Heritage label, given to firms keeping exceptional craft alive.

Today its looms run in Saint-Vincent-de-Reins, a village in the Haut-Beaujolais hills about 70km northwest of Lyon, the city that gave the world the Jacquard loom. It's a corner of France that has been weaving for centuries, and it shows.

Jacquards, prints and yarn-dyed cloth are its speciality, made in modern facilities built to demanding environmental standards: wastewater treated, waste managed, recycled fibres in the mix. The mill has its own name for the approach. Not fast fashion, but soul fashion.