What Makes a Flannel a Flannel
What Makes a Flannel a Flannel
The plaid is the picture. The flannel is the cloth. They are two different things and only one of them is flannel.
A Welsh word
The word comes from Wales. Gwlanen means a woolen article, a piece of woolen cloth. Wales had a serious wool trade running by the sixteenth century and a flannel trade by the seventeenth, in towns like Newtown and Llanidloes.
It traveled. The French were saying flanelle by the late 1600s. The Germans had Flanell by the early 1700s. A Welsh farm cloth became a European word, and then a word everybody in the world uses without knowing where it came from.
The nap is the point
Here is the thing people get wrong, and it is worth knowing. Flannel is not a pattern. It is a finish.
You weave the cloth, then you brush it. Fine wire brushes lift the ends of the fibers up off the surface so the weave underneath goes soft and slightly out of focus. That raised surface is the nap, and the nap is what holds warm air against you. It is the same principle as the down cluster and the wool cable. Trapped air is warmth.
Brush one side and you get a shirt that is soft against your skin. Brush both and you get something warmer and heavier. How hard you brush, and how many passes, changes the whole character of the cloth.
The plaid is a separate decision
A check or a plaid comes from dyeing the yarns before the cloth is woven, so the pattern lives in the threads themselves and runs all the way through. That is a beautiful thing to do, and it is also completely independent of whether the cloth is a flannel.
So a flannel can be a solid. A plaid can be smooth. The two just happen to keep excellent company, and they have for three hundred years.
Ours
Our Huntley flannel is a green and orange cloth produced specially for Black Bear Brand in Japan. It is 4.9 ounces and one hundred percent cotton. It is designed in the USA and made in Japan by our shirt makers there, with buttons made in Japan. It is cut oversized, and I size down in it.
There is a Sky Blue and a Red distressed plaid alongside it. Three cloths, one standard, and I would put any of them next to anything made anywhere.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
Black Bear Brand Huntley Flannel
Black Bear Brand Sky Blue Flannel
Black Bear Brand Red Distressed Plaid Button-Up Shirt
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