Good clothes demand good fabrics: artisanal, natural, and texture-rich. For many brands, Japan has become the go-to place to find them. But, thanks to a young self-taught weaver, a new wave of French brands is looking closer to home.
Before he set out to resurrect a fading local weaving tradition, 34-year-old Cédric Plumey worked at Louis Vuitton. For a couple of years, he found himself inside the luxury house’s engine rooms, handling the unglamorous stuff – finance and logistics. He didn’t like it. Neither did he enjoy Paris.
So in 2016, Plumey quit Vuitton, returned to his native northeast France, and set up shop in Étupes, a small village of around 4,000 people. The region was once home to a thriving community of artisanal weavers, who specialized in a checkered cotton-linen blend called kelsch. Traditionally used for tablecloths and bedspreads, the fabric has been making a comeback through the farmer-chic garments of Unkruid, a slow-fashion Belgian line that’s become a years-long Plumey collaborator.
Long before his fabrics were forming actual garments, Plumey had to figure out how to make kelsch in the first place, let alone revive the tradition around it. With the small local workshops either gone or replaced by factories, he found himself on his own – literally. “I bought some old looms, installed them in a warehouse, and started by trial and error, following instructions from a 1930s textile-engineering handbook I’d found online,” he says. After a couple of months, he got them up and running. Because he was still learning how to weave, it took him a year and a half to produce his first quality fabric, a selvedge made on an old Belgian shuttle loom.
“When you’re making fabrics this way, the number of possible flaws is infinite – and because it needs to be perfect, every single flaw has to be identified and eliminated,” says Plumey. “It can drive you mad, especially if you’re self-taught and figuring things out as you go.”
In the early days of Manufacture Métis, his now sought-after fabric company, Plumey used to work 60 to 70 hours a week. He travelled across Europe to find and buy bobbin winders, warping machines, and looms, most dating back to the early 20th century. Back home he would dismantle, restore, and fine-tune them, a complex process that can take up to two months. His workshop currently houses fifteen working looms. Plumey and an assistant run about five or six of them, producing a maximum of 200 meters a day of their signature cotton-linen and cotton-wool blends in different variations from heavy herringbones to breezy twills.
“What Cédric creates is the only true luxury,” says Gauthier Borsarello, Paris-based designer, stylist, collector, and all-round fashion Renaissance man. ”It’s a much-needed reminder that the real meaning of the word ‘expensive’ lies in the rarity of the material.”
With Manufacture Métis, Plumey is weaving for a new generation of thoughtful, quality-first one-man French brands, including Jean Laumet, Burgaud, and Oliver Church, whose exhaustively handmade shirts are sold at retailers as uncompromising as Vancouver’s Neighbour and Tokyo’s Maidens Shop. Plumey sometimes blames himself for the narrow geographical scope of his collaborators. “I don’t make any effort to increase my online visibility,” he says. “I’m just too busy.” Others praise him for his single-mindedness. “In France, fabric manufacturing is dominated by a handful of big industrial players. In just a couple of years, Plumey has become the major reason we no longer have to source our fabrics abroad,” says Loïs Dionisio, who runs a made to measure boutique-workshop in Lyon, where ninety percent of the fabrics used come from Plumey.
“Cédric is as hands-on as it gets. He will tweak the machines for you if necessary,” says Clément Douillet, designer and co-founder of Maison Douillet, a luxury outdoors brand from the French Alps. “Most crucially: unlike many fabric manufacturers or mills, where orders start at 200, 300, or even 1,000 meters, Cédric doesn’t work with minimums, which means you can experiment even without deep pockets.”
There’s no such thing as good clothes without good fabric. And the best good clothes are made from the best good fabric. Which is why so many brands, both aspiring and established, are desperate to find it. To his clients, Plumey offers something extremely rare not only in this part of the world but anywhere, really: high-quality fabrics produced on a human scale. It’s what his circle of emerging French brands appreciates, too: Plumey's singular attitude – hardworking, easygoing, and stubbornly committed to keeping artisanal heritage alive. “With him, as with us,” says Loïs Dionisio, “it’s not about commerce or strategy. It’s about the value of the hands and the eyes of the maker – and that’s as relevant today as it was a century ago.”
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