REPORT Cotton plant
Product development
A supplier’s continuing quest to find the right material
by Wies Mauduit
In the fashion industry, of which millinery is a part, we are used to seeing new styles, ‘new’ colours and new materials emerge every season. But some firms not only excel in what they do; they also invest time, money and energy in perfecting the products they already make and in finding alternatives for the ones that have disappeared. We spoke with Nick Parkin, Managing Director of Parkin Fabrics, and his daughter Bexi about the firm’s efforts to improve one of their flagship materials, buckram, and the constant need to adapt.
Nick Parkin with newly
arrived buckram made from recycled cotton
Historic origins
To most milliners, Parkin Fabrics is best known for their wide range of millinery supplies. But as the name indicates, they started out as, and still are above all, a fabric manufacturer. The company is firmly rooted in Oldham, Greater Manchester, in the north west of England. Nick’s father, David, who founded the firm in 1989, started his career in a cotton dye house in nearby Greenfield in Saddleworth, an area once known as the cotton-spinning capital of the world. Saddleworth contains a number of villages with a long history (dating back to 1200) in textiles and weaving. Oldham was known for its textile processing, and counted over 400 mills, primarily for cotton spinning. The raw cotton was imported from India and the Middle East because it had longer fibres than the North American variety and therefore made better quality yarns.
David Parkin realised early on that he did not want to spend his whole life “stuck inside a dye house” and set himself up as a fabric salesman in London. At some point in his career, probably in the late 1960s, he stumbled across the millinery industry, then still very prominent in the
58 | the hat magazine #97 Sinamay is made from the abaca plant
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