American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home – by Steven Kurutz / The Annals of Flannel.

American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home – March 12, 2024

by Steven Kurutz (Author)

 

#1 Best Seller in Fashion & Textile Business

“I can confidently say this will be one of my favorite books of 2024.” —Stephen King, bestselling author (and onetime millworker)

 

“American Flannel is a wonderful book--surprising, entertaining, vivid and personal, but also enlightening on the largest questions of America's economic and social future.” —James Fallows, co-author of Our Towns

 

The little-engine-that-could story of how a band of scrappy entrepreneurs are reviving the enterprise of manufacturing clothing in the United States.

 

For decades, clothing manufacture was a pillar of U.S. industry. But beginning in the 1980s, Americans went from wearing 70 percent domestic-made apparel to almost none. Even the very symbol of American freedom and style—blue jeans—got outsourced. With offshoring, the nation lost not only millions of jobs but also crucial expertise and artistry.

 

Dismayed by shoddy imported “fast fashion”—and unable to stop dreaming of re-creating a favorite shirt from his youth—Bayard Winthrop set out to build a new company, American Giant, that would swim against this trend. New York Times reporter Steven Kurutz, in turn, began to follow Winthrop’s journey. He discovered other trailblazers as well, from the “Sock Queen of Alabama” to a pair of father-son shoemakers and a men’s style blogger who almost single-handedly drove a campaign to make “Made in the USA” cool. Eye-opening and inspiring, American Flannel is the story of how a band of visionaries and makers are building a new supply chain on the skeleton of the old and wedding old-fashioned craftsmanship to cutting-edge technology and design to revive an essential American dream.

 

The Annals of Flannel

 

Told that the cozy shirting fabric could no longer be made in America, one man began a yearlong quest.

 

Steven Kurutz

By Steven Kurutz

Nov. 28, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/style/made-in-america-flannel-shirt.html

 

Three years ago, Bayard Winthrop, the chief executive and founder of the clothing brand American Giant, started thinking about a flannel shirt he wore as a kid in the 1970s. It was blue plaid and bought for him by his grandmother, probably at Caldor, a discount department store popular in the northeast back then. The flannel was one of the first pieces of clothing Mr. Winthrop owned that suggested a personality.

 

“I thought it looked great,” he said, “and I thought it said something about me. That I was cool and physical and capable and outdoorsy.”

 

Since 2011 American Giant, or AG, has mass-produced everyday sportswear for men and women, like the Lee jeans or Russell sweatshirts once sold in stores like Caldor — from the ginned cotton to the cutting and sewing — entirely in the U.S. Mr. Winthrop, a former financier who had run a snowshoe firm, made it the company’s mission to, in his words, “bring back ingenuity and optimism to the towns that make things.” He’s been very successful, especially with a full-zip sweatshirt Slate called “the greatest hoodie ever made.” AG has introduced denim, leggings and socks, among other products.

 

But Mr. Winthrop’s madeleine of a garment proved elusive. “We kept asking around and hearing, ‘Not flannel. You can do all these other things here, maybe. Flannel is gone.’” he said.

 

 

L.L. Bean, Woolrich, Ralph Lauren and Pendleton all made their reputations on rugged, cozy flannel shirts, but not one of those brands make them domestically today. In fact, “flannel hasn’t been made in America for decades,” said Nate Herman, an executive for the American Apparel & Footwear Association, a Washington D.C.-based trade group. Some small family-run brands, like the Vermont Flannel Company and Gitman Bros., sew shirts in the U.S., but the fabric is woven overseas. Portugal and China are today the main producers of yarn-dyed flannel, Mr. Herman said.

 

Although it originated in Wales in the 17th century, flannel is a classic American garment, worn by Wyoming ranchers and California surfers, deer hunters and rock and hip-hop musicians. It was a key reference in Marc Jacobs’s then-notorious grunge collection for Perry Ellis in 1992, which was recently reissued. Like a pair of bluejeans, a flannel shirt conveys laid-back comfort and rugged durability.

 

Bringing its manufacture back to America, Mr. Winthrop thought, could be deeply symbolic. Both of the capability of U.S. manufacturing and of the need for big fashion brands to invest here again. It was a quixotic artisanal project, perhaps, but one with potentially high business stakes.

 

“Forty years ago, we were able to make great shirts here, great jeans here, sold at a price that made sense to mainstream consumers,” Mr. Winthrop said at the outset of his project. “We’ve lost that capability in 40 years? We can’t make a flannel shirt in America? I’m not going to accept that answer.”

 

“Made in America” has become a marketing catchphrase espoused by both Brooklyn $400 selvage denim enthusiasts and Trump isolationists. And brands like American Apparel have led a renaissance of sorts in domestic manufacturing. But producing clothes in the U.S. today is exceedingly complicated. Over the last 30 years, the textile industry has been decimated by outsourcing and unfavorable trade deals, shedding 1.4 million jobs in the process, said Augustine Tantillo, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations.

 

Communities that produced clothes for generations, like Fort Payne, Ala., the former sock capital of the world, were mortally wounded when mills closed. Sometimes the expertise or work force have dissipated. Sometimes it’s the machinery, the looms, that have gone overseas.

 

Each time AG develops a new product, Mr. Winthrop must patch together its supply chain from what remains. To help him navigate the process, he relies on “old dogs in the industry,” he said, though AG is based in San Francisco and runs like a tech start-up, with sales almost entirely online.

 

For flannel, he called James McKinnon.

 

At 50, Mr. McKinnon is not that old (Mr. Winthrop is 49). But he is the third McKinnon to run Cotswold Industries, the textile manufacturer his grandfather started in 1954. Cotswold made the woven fabric for headliners inside Ford cars. Later, the firm manufactured pocket linings for Lee, Wrangler and Levi jeans. Cotswold still handles pocketing business for many U.S. brands, part of a diverse portfolio that includes making fabrics for culinary apparel. The fabrics are woven at its mill in Central, S.C.

 

Mr. Winthrop called Mr. McKinnon at his office in midtown Manhattan and ran through the list of questions. Why is flannel gone? What would it take to bring it back? How would you do it?

 

Mr. McKinnon was familiar with the story of American Giant and the hoodie. In an industry that has been waging a 40-year global economic war of attrition, and mostly losing, it is heartening to see an apparel company committed to America.

 

You don’t survive as a U.S. textile manufacturer without being smart and nimble, and without being a little battle-scarred. Mr. McKinnon is all of these things. Lately, he had been thinking about more than just surviving.

 

“Do we want to develop products that we are proud of? That aren’t just, you know, what we’ve always done but trying to do it cheaper,” he said. “You get tired of always playing defense. Let’s play some offense.”

 

Besides, Mr. McKinnon had his own positive if hazy memories of flannel. “I spent four or five years touring with the Grateful Dead,” he said. “I think I wore one flannel shirt for two years.”

 

Here was a partner who could “quarterback” a project that would prove to be incredibly challenging.

 

Shirting in general is more complicated than a T-shirt or fleece because it’s woven rather than knit. Wovens typically require more needlework, which means higher labor costs, which means that they have been outsourced more aggressively than knits or denim. And a flannel is a very complicated woven shirt.

 

For a T-shirt, raw material is fed into a circular knitting machine and a roll of fabric is cranked out and dyed red or blue or purple. But flannel requires the dyeing of each individual yarn, which is what gives it the patterned look of, say, Buffalo plaid.

 

Those dyed yarns are put on a weaving machine, or loom. There are lengthwise, or warp, yarns and crosswise, or weft, yarns. To get the famous red and black squares even and blended, the warping must be done precisely right. And the more intricate the pattern or numerous the colors, the more complex the warping and the harder the weave.

 

As anyone who loves one knows, flannel shirts are soft, which is achieved through a finishing process called napping.

 

“Flannel, of all the things in your wardrobe, is the one thing that you know intuitively if you like or not,” Mr. Winthrop said. “It has to feel right in your hand.”

 

‘The Best People I Know’

He had to find suppliers who could dye the yarn; weave the flannel; finish and nap it; and finally, cut and sew the fabric into shirts. And those partners, if they still existed, would also have to tolerate risk, because American Giant would begin with small test runs. Would a mill gear up its machinery and work force for 8,000 yards, instead of 80,000 or 800,000?

 

Mr. McKinnon convened a meeting with his team, drawing up a chart of all the stages. “I said, ‘Guys, take a look. This can be done here. This can be done here. This can be done here.’” Claiming impossibility at first, “finally the team looked at me and said, ‘Huh.’”

 

What gave Mr. McKinnon confidence initially was that Cotswold held onto a tiny piece of the yarn-dyed shirting business that involved uniforms for the Metro-North and Long Island Railroads.

 

“The transit workers that take your ticket wear a yarn-dyed shirt,” Mr. McKinnon said. “They’ve got that little pinstriped shirt.”

 

The shirts weren’t sportswear, the pattern wasn’t complex, but it meant the manufacturing of flannel was theoretically possible.

 

It was the expertise, the artistry, that remained a concern. The dyeing process, the way color takes to yarn, is both a science and an art. So is the laying of a warp and a weft. So is napping. Was anyone left who knew how to do it for flannel?

 

In May, Mr. Winthrop and Mr. McKinnon met for coffee in New York. The mood between them was tentative but buoyant. Over the winter, the flannel project had inched forward, with early hurdles cleared.

 

In March, the designer at American Giant, Sharon Aris, submitted her patterns for approval. Ms. Aris collected vintage Pendleton flannels for inspiration, but those shirts had been made during the glory days, and she quickly faced modern realities.

 

She couldn’t design one of those hand-loomed, 10-color hippie flannels like Neil Young wore back in the “Harvest” days. She could use six yarn colors at most, to produce three patterns. These had to be commercial for American Giant and, as important, able to be woven by Cotswold.

 

For Ms. Aris, who had designed for the contemporary label Esprit, this was a different way of working. Usually she sent designs to China or Eastern Europe and got back samples three months later. It was soulless but cheap.

 

Now she was in close communication with the manufacturer, collaborating on the design. This was how Mr. Winthrop had made the famous hoodie, working with a finisher called Carolina Cotton Works, or CCW, to painstakingly recreate the napped feel of old Champion sweatshirts.

 

Ms. Aris and Mr. Winthrop waited nervously throughout March to learn if Cotswold’s technicians could weave their designs. Mr. Winthrop wanted the shirts to go on sale for Christmas 2018. Any delays or roadblocks might cause AG to scrap the winter season, or the entire project.

 

In early April, Mr. McKinnon had called to say the patterns could be woven at Cotswold’s mill.

 

Now, as Mr. Winthrop and Mr. McKinnon talked over coffee, they addressed another concern — the yarn dyeing.

 

Mr. McKinnon had introduced Mr. Winthrop to “the best people I know,” in the domestic yarn-dyeing business, a North Carolina company called Burlington Manufacturing Services, or BMS. Cotswold used BMS to dye the blue Oxford fabric it made for Catholic-school shirts, another niche business.

 

When Ron Farris, sales representative for BMS, was contacted by the men, he couldn’t believe he was talking about flannel in 2018. BMS, Mr. Farris wrote them, was onboard. “It tickles me to no end,” is how he put it.

 

“The last 20, 25 years have been very, very frustrating,” Mr. McKinnon said at the coffee shop. “It’s been rolling rocks uphill trying to figure out how to be competitive. Now, because of this collaboration, you get up in the morning and you’ve got a hop to your step. Let’s go make something awesome.”

 

A Good Yarn

In June, Mr. Winthrop flew from San Francisco to North Carolina to visit the facilities working on the flannel project. Traveling regularly between the booming, energetic coasts and struggling mill towns had deepened his commitments. In 2013, AG bought a sewing facility in tiny Middlesex, N.C., that was scheduled to shut down, saving the jobs of 120 workers there.

 

Like an idealistic politician, Mr. Winthrop repeats the same stump speech wherever he goes. The speech scolds clothing brands who have gone overseas to save nickels. The speech highlights the benefits in efficiency and product quality of doing business here. But the speech also warns of a stark division happening in U.S. textiles, between companies who have “the vision, courage and capital to stay ahead of the curve,” as Mr. Winthrop likes to say, and those who don’t.

 

Mr. Winthrop had been speechifying on the morning he pulled up to the Pioneer Plant in Burlington, N.C., where BMS, the yarn dyer, was headquartered.

 

Inside, he was met by the brain trust: Al Blalock, the president; Bill Singleton, the director of sales; and Mr. Farris, the sales representative. Mr. Farris started in the industry in 1979. That made him the young guy in the group.

 

“Welcome to BMS, a division of Decorative Fabrics of America,” Mr. Blalock said as everyone gathered around a table in a drab, outdated conference room.

 

The company’s long, difficult history was narrated for Mr. Winthrop. BMS was formerly part of Burlington Industries, once the largest textile manufacturer in the world, weaving 1.8 million yards of fabric each week at one mill alone. Then came a hostile takeover attempt from a private-equity vulture. Then outsourcing and downsizing. Then splintering of divisions.

 

“When was Burlington the largest in the world?” Mr. Winthrop asked.

 

“Seventies. Into the eighties,” said Mr. Farris, who has a salesman’s chatty ebullience. “Eighty-eight is when the crap kind of hit the fan.”

 

BMS, the yarn dyeing business, was bought from Burlington Industries by private investors in 2007.

 

Mr. Blalock ran through the firm’s clients, an assorted group. BMS dyed yarn for apparel, hosiery, upholstery, mattress fabrics, braids and ropes, health care and industrial products. It dyed the rappelling rope the military used on helicopters.

 

“You ever see the movie ‘Black Hawk Down?’” Mr. Singleton said. “That’s the ropes they used.”

 

Mr. Blalock said: “You can’t be a one-trick pony in today’s markets, because you’re competing with the world.”

 

These men had lived through an economic tsunami. When the needle flew overseas, the upstream suppliers that service the mills, like cotton farmers, dye houses and finishers, also saw their business disappear. This is how they had survived, by finding every little niche market they could.

 

Mr. Blalock, Mr. Singleton and Mr. Farris were warriors of a sort. They were real old dogs; their collective age was around 200. And the facility they worked in, the Pioneer Plant, dated to 1923.

 

Touring the vast mill with its older machinery and silver-haired executives and rooms largely empty of workers, Mr. Winthrop began to look panicked. He needed good yarn-dyed fabric to make his shirts. Without it, he was sunk.

 

When was the last time yarn for flannel was dyed here? the men were asked.

 

“There was another company we dyed yarn for. Pendleton shirts,” Mr. Singleton said. He searched his memory. “Probably 30 years ago.”

 

Mr. Farris, the salesman, portrayed confidence to his client. “We dye yarn for shirting every day. Just a different type,” he said.

 

“There’s probably 120 years of experience right here,” Mr. Singleton said, looking to his colleagues.

 

But driving away, Mr. Winthrop was shaken.

 

Later that day, he addressed his concerns during a scheduled meeting with Mr. McKinnon at Cotswold’s sister facility, Central Textiles, in Central, S.C.

 

“Talk me off the ledge,” Mr. Winthrop said. “Have you been to that facility?”

 

Mr. McKinnon said he had, two years earlier.

 

“Maybe you should take another swing through,” Mr. Winthrop said. “It just felt like a cavernous space where not much was happening.”

 

Mr. McKinnon replied, “That’s the state of the U.S. textile industry.”

 

Cotswold’s Central plant was once owned by Cannon Mills, another big producer (of towels and sheets) long gone. In a welcome sight, the old brick buildings bustled with workers and delivery trucks on this afternoon. Bales of cotton and polyester come in one end and go out the other as woven fabric.

 

What was being woven on this day was flannel for American Giant.

 

Mr. McKinnon led Mr. Winthrop into a fluorescent-lit room the size of a football field with looms spaced every few feet. The machines were new but noisy. The men had to shout to speak, though the big smiles said everything.

 

One of Ms. Aris’ three patterns, a black plaid, was coming off the section beam in stiff sheets. Mr. Winthrop got his face right down to the sewing needles, to examine the warping for flaws. He found none. The yarn color was rich and beautiful. The old dogs at BMS had delivered as promised.

 

“You are looking at the first weaving of flannel in America since probably the mid-90s,” said Mr. McKinnon, who himself was seeing it for the first time.

 

Mr. McKinnon asked Mr. Winthrop, “What do you think?”

 

Mr. Winthrop was unusually reticent, seemingly in shock. He had pulled it off. “All the detail … Actually seeing the pattern come together…,” he said, trailing off.

 

“This is the hardest technical engineering aspect of this entire adventure,” Mr. McKinnon said, satisfied. “Bayard has been asking me every week on a scale of 1 to 100 what my confidence level is. Right now, it’s 95.”

 

Months passed. Spirits remained high. Mr. Winthrop, who is built low and squat like a wrestler, had “put his shoulder into it,” as he likes to say, and pushed through. Mr. McKinnon, along with every worker up and down the supply chain, proved that the technical capability had never left, only the appetite to do business here. They were nearing champagne-popping time.

 

‘Tickle It a Little Bit’

Then came another snag.

 

It involved what was supposed to be the easy part — the napping and finishing. Mr. McKinnon had recommended a finisher that returned to American Giant flannel with all the softness of an outdoor carpet.

 

The fabric was sent back. Five times. Additional rounds yielded little improvement, and weeks flew by. All of August into September, wasted.

 

Mr. McKinnon called Mr. Winthrop one day. They discussed the Christmas deadline and its unlikelihood now. They discussed chalking up the whole thing to a noble failure. Mr. McKinnon apologized and took the blame.

 

In September, in a last-ditch effort, Mr. McKinnon and Mr. Winthrop sent a few rolls of fabric to Carolina Cotton Works and its president, Page Ashby. CCW had not been hired for the flannel project, because it couldn’t do every finishing process under one roof. Still, it was Mr. Ashby who had collaborated on the famous hoodie, and now he and his workers “huddled up” with the fabric.

 

Over the phone, Mr. Ashby explained how flannel becomes soft. “You have to raise those fibers out of the yarn. Get it to be a little bit fuzzy, if you will. Not like a blanket. We just wanted to tickle it a little bit.”

 

CCW did the right amount of tickling. The fabric finally felt like the flannel shirt Mr. Winthrop had worn as a kid, the one that made him feel cool and capable.

 

Another finisher, Yates Bleachery Company, in Flintstone, Ga., would handle the crucial step of preshrinking. Then onto Jade Apparel in Philadelphia for the cutting and sewing of shirts.

 

Now that they’d fully reassembled the supply chain, a new, modified plan was hatched: American Giant would do a limited run, 2,000 yards, or enough fabric to make about 1,200 shirts, priced at around $100 apiece. BMS, Cotswold, CCW, Yates, Jade — all would have to rush production. But American flannel would be available for winter, with more to come in the new year.

 

Was it worth all the trouble, for a shirt?

 

Mr. Winthrop did not have to think about his answer. “We wanted to start an American-made business and build it to scale,” he said, over lunch at a restaurant in Lower Manhattan earlier this month. “The consistent narrative was, ‘You can’t do that, it’s all gone overseas.’ We heard that with the fleece, with premium tees. This was the next chapter.”

 

Mr. Winthrop leaned across the table, as if putting his shoulder into his reply. “Set the business part of it aside,” he said. “The thing I continue to be so struck by in the supply chain is this latent undercurrent of, ‘Give us a shot.’ It’s worth it for that alone — to prove the ability to do it.”

 

Steven Kurutz joined The Times in 2011 and wrote for the City and Home sections before joining Style. He was previously a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and Details. More about Steven Kurutz

Inside the Garrick, the Elite Men-Only London Club Rocked by Criticism / I’m a Garrick member. The exclusion of women is the opposite of liberal. It is out of date and wrong

 

Inside the Garrick, the Elite Men-Only London Club Rocked by Criticism

 

Founded in 1831, the opulent private club has long guarded its membership list closely. A leak this month caused a scandal.

The Garrick Club in London’s theater district counts among its roughly 1,300 members judges, actors, Britain’s deputy prime minister and King Charles III.

 

Mark Landler

By Mark Landler

Reporting from London

 

March 27, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/world/europe/garrick-club-london.html?searchResultPosition=1

 

On a side street in Covent Garden stands an imposing palazzo-style building, strangely out of place amid the burger joints and neon marquees of London’s theater district. It houses the Garrick Club, one of Britain’s oldest men’s clubs, and on any given weekday, a lunch table in its baronial dining room is one of the hottest tickets in town.

 

A visitor lucky enough to cadge an invitation from a member might end up in the company of a Supreme Court justice, the master of an Oxford college or the editor of a London newspaper. The odds are that person would be a man. Women are excluded from membership in the Garrick and permitted only as guests, a long-simmering source of tension that has recently erupted into a full-blown furor.

 

After The Guardian, a London newspaper, put a fresh spotlight on the Garrick’s men-only policy, naming and shaming some of its rarefied members from a leaked membership list, two senior British government officials resigned from the club: Richard Moore, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, and Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, who oversees nearly half a million public employees.

 

Only days earlier, under questioning at a Parliamentary hearing, Mr. Case defended his membership by saying he was trying to reform an “antediluvian” institution from within rather “than chuck rocks from the outside,” a line that provoked derisory laughs. Mr. Moore’s membership seemed at odds with his efforts to bring more racial and gender diversity to the British spy agency, known as MI6.

 

Now, the club’s 1,300 members are debating the future of the Garrick over lamb chops in the dining room, after-dinner drinks in the lounge under the main staircase and in a WhatsApp group, where they swap fretful messages about the latest developments. Some welcome the pressure to admit women as long overdue; others lament that doing so would forever change the character of the place.

 

“The Garrick Club has an absolute right to decide who its members are,” said Simon Jenkins, a columnist at The Guardian and a former editor of The Times of London who is a longtime member. “That said, it is indefensible for any social club these days not to have women as members.”

 

“Judi Dench, for God’s sake — why shouldn’t she be a member?” he added.

 

Or Jude Kelly, an award-winning former theater director. Ms. Kelly, who now runs the charity Women of the World, said that excluding women from membership in the Garrick deprived them of access to an elite social circle where professional opportunities inevitably flowed with the brandy.

 

“We’re in 2024,” Ms. Kelly said. “These are incredibly senior people. Many of them are espousing diversity and inclusion in their professional lives. Being on the inside for a long time makes you complicit.”

 

The Garrick Club is not the only private club in London that does not admit women: White’s, Boodle’s, the Beefsteak Club and the Savile Club are also men only. But what makes the Garrick unique is its star-studded membership list, which ranges across the worlds of politics, law, arts, theater and journalism.

 

Members, based on The Guardian’s leaked list, include the actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Brian Cox and Stephen Fry; Mark Knopfler, the guitarist of the rock band Dire Straits; Paul Smith, the fashion designer; the BBC correspondent John Simpson; Oliver Dowden, Britain’s deputy prime minister; and, yes, King Charles III (on an honorary basis).

 

The boldfaced names have lent the dispute extra piquancy, especially since many of them would seem the kind of bien-pensant progressives who would abhor any kind of discriminatory policy. Indeed, Mr. Cox, Mr. Fry and Mr. Simpson are among those who have come out publicly in favor of admitting women.

 

The last time the members voted on the question, in 2015, a slender majority — 50.5 percent — said they supported it. But the club’s bylaws require a two-thirds majority to change the policy on membership, and a new vote, if it were scheduled, would not be held until the summer. A club official declined to comment on the matter.

 

For all the misgivings that members have about not admitting women, some predict they would still fail to reach the two-thirds threshold. The dispute has, perhaps inevitably, turned bitter, pitting a handful of committed campaigners against a larger, older group, many of whom are fine with women as guests but are reluctant to rock a boat that has sailed grandly since 1831.

 

In New York City, private clubs like the Union League and the Century Association began admitting women in the 1980s, often under the pressure of legal judgments. But in London, where clubs like the Garrick are more zealous about being social rather than professional networking institutions, defenders argue that the case for preserving male-only membership is more justifiable.

 

These members say they go to the Garrick to drink wine, unwind and enjoy themselves. They crack jokes they wouldn’t make in mixed company. They are not allowed to conduct business; even pulling papers out of a briefcase is looked down upon.

 

Some dismissed it as a tempest in a teapot. Jonathan Sumption, a lawyer and former justice in the Supreme Court, said he supported the admission of women, but added that those who opposed it were entitled to their opinion.

 

“The Garrick Club is not a public body and the whole issue is too unimportant to make a fuss of,” Mr. Sumption said. “It is still a pretty good club.”

 

Mr. Jenkins, the columnist, agreed, suggesting that some of the news coverage had caricatured the Garrick as a vaguely sinister place where men gather to plot against women. Women, he said, were welcome at the communal table in the dining room, perhaps the club’s most hallowed place.

 

The only room off limits to women is the members’ lounge, known as Under the Stairs, where men gather after dinner. Yet, as Ms. Kelly and other women note, the most valuable relationships are often formed in such informal settings.

 

To that extent, the Garrick is different from White’s, an even more exclusive men’s club in St. James’s, where Queen Elizabeth II was the only woman ever invited as a guest. When President Donald J. Trump’s ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, held lunches there with his senior staff, he could not invite his own political counselor because she was a woman. Female employees at the embassy complained to the State Department, and he was urged to end the practice.

 

But White’s and its old-line, Conservative-friendly brethren “tend to be high Tory places, where the question wouldn’t arise,” said Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, who resigned from the Garrick more than a decade ago.

 

“The Garrick membership is more a mix of actors, journalists and lawyers,” he said. “Thus, it’s a more pertinent question.”

 

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Mark Landler

I’m a Garrick member. The exclusion of women is the opposite of liberal. It is out of date and wrong

Simon Jenkins

I feel strongly that any association of citizens in a free society should be allowed to make its own rules. But this ban is absurd

 

Wed 27 Mar 2024 12.09 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/27/garrick-club-member-women-ban

 

Do clubs matter? Yes, to their members, and clearly to those they exclude. When Alexis de Tocqueville compared American democracy with British, he said America’s roots were in the mob and Britain’s in the club. Americans vote for a president who doesn’t sit in Congress. Britons vote for a member of parliament, a tight-knit Westminster club.

 

The revived argument over London’s Garrick Club would have been music to De Tocqueville’s ears. Here we go again, a gang of London elitists ruling the land from a Covent Garden palace untainted by plebs or women. And this in the 21st century. Give us a break.

 

Places where those of like mind can meet and enjoy each other’s company are valuable. They enrich leisure and guard against loneliness. As guilds, lodges and associations, they exist in every community – including some for men and women separately. London’s clubs are a case in point. The Garrick, where I am a member, is not some fiendish hotbed of influence. Its average age is about 70 and those who frequent it are overwhelmingly retired. In my view, it cannot be regarded as a significant centre of power, but rather a good place to eat and entertain. It is popular and certainly livelier than traditional clubland haunts.

 

The Garrick was named after the actor David Garrick, as the club for London’s theatrical and arts community. Its “affinity” was no different from the military clubs’ exclusion of certain classes of soldier or the university clubs’ restriction to Oxbridge. All originally excluded women. Many clubs such as Brooks’s, Boodle’s, the Travellers and the Savile continue this exclusion of women, or exclusion of men in the case of the University Women’s. The Savile kept its cool in 2017 when it allowed a member to stay after they transitioned to become a woman. Margaret Thatcher was made a member of the men-only Carlton Club in 1975, largely because no one dared exclude her.

 

What makes the Garrick different – and has attracted media attention – is that some of its members are prominent in public affairs, including, apparently, the king. He is not known to have used the club. Membership seems to confer networking power beyond its walls. In particular, the Garrick has long been favoured by senior lawyers, with a profusion of senior judges. The judiciary is a largely self-governing profession and many lawyers – not only women – have come to regard membership as divisive and potentially a kind of freemasonry. Earlier this week a number of judges were pressed into resigning. It is within the legal world these concerns are concentrated. I really do not think such a charge could be directed at other professions at the club. It is merely absurd, not career-damaging, that Stephen Fry can belong to the Garrick, but not Judi Dench.

 

In truth, the Garrick’s problem over women attracts publicity because, unlike the other all-male clubs, it contains a large number of progressive members who want women in and who have been fighting for it for years. In the last two votes on women, in 2015 and last autumn, a clear majority was in favour, but the rules stated that two-thirds was required to carry. Legal opinion has since been sought, and it is plain that there is no actual rule opposing female members. There is therefore no rule that has to be changed. The membership committee can simply allow women to join.

 

I feel strongly that any association of citizens in a free society should be allowed to hold its own opinions and make its own rules, from political parties to London clubs. But for me, the exclusion of women from havens of civilised conversation and debate is the opposite of liberal. It is out of date and wrong.

 

In the case of the Garrick, this is not a purely private matter. The club has become a symbolic institution on London’s cultural scene, its exclusivity a practice that should long ago have ended. The majority of its members clearly want that discrimination to end. I sense it is about to happen. I look forward to celebrating it.

 

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Garrick Club asked to consider membership for seven leading women

 

Garrick Club asked to consider membership for seven leading women

 

A group of men at the club who hope the male-only rule will change have nominated a set of possible new members

 

Amelia Gentleman

Thu 28 Mar 2024 19.58 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/28/garrick-club-seven-women-nominated-membership

 

Seven women with leading positions in the British establishment have been nominated as prospective female members of the Garrick in the event that the club agrees to change its rules so that women are able to join.

 

The classicist Mary Beard, the former home secretary Amber Rudd, Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman and the new Labour peer Ayesha Hazarika are among the first names to have been put forward to the club as possible future members.

 

Also on the list are the actor Juliet Stevenson, Margaret Casely-Hayford, who chairs the trustees of Shakespeare’s Globe and is chancellor of Coventry University, and Elizabeth Gloster, formerly an appeal court judge.

 

A group of Garrick members who hope the rules on female members will change have tentatively proposed these names to the club’s administration seeking confirmation that they would, in theory, be eligible for admission to the club.

 

Stephen Fry, the broadcaster Matt Frei and the opera singer Ian Bostridge were among the signatories proposing these women as potential future members. After securing confirmation from the women that they were happy in principle to be put up as club members, the proposers sent their names to the Garrick chair on Wednesday, asking for guidance on how to proceed.

 

The release of the women’s names marks an attempt by members to initiate a damage limitation exercise to protect the Garrick’s battered reputation, after a string of high-profile resignations from the club after controversy over the Guardian’s publication of a long list of names of senior figures from Whitehall, politics, the arts and the judiciary as members of a club that has repeatedly blocked the admission of women since the 1960s.

 

Last week the head of MI6, Richard Moore, and the head of the civil service, Simon Case, resigned from the club, after deciding that membership was incompatible with their organisations’ commitment to improving diversity. By Monday, at least four judges had tendered their resignations from the Garrick.

 

On Thursday the Bar Council, the professional body for barristers, warned that exclusive members’ clubs created “the potential for unfair advantage” for lawyers seeking to become judges. “Closed doors and exclusionary spaces do not foster support or collaboration between colleagues,” the organisation’s chair said.

 

Made public for the first time by the Guardian, the club’s closely guarded membership book includes dozens of judges, dozens of members of the House of Lords, the deputy prime minister, the secretary of state for levelling up, the chief executive of the Royal Opera House, at least 10 MPs, heads of influential thinktanks, law firms, private equity companies, academics, prominent actors, rock stars and senior journalists.

 

Mary Beard said: “I have enjoyed my visits to the Garrick and would love to become a member. If they won’t have me, there might be many reasons – I won’t be suing them, but it will have been worth a shot.”

 

Another of the new nominees said she was reluctant to be quoted publicly at this stage, but added: “My view is that when I was approached I thought it was a bit hypocritical to decline the invitation after spending years railing against all-male bastions.”

 

The club’s managing committee is considering a new legal opinion given by the David Pannick KC, who led the successful Brexit article 50 case against the government, advising that the current rules at the men-only do not in fact bar women from being members.

 

The club’s chair, Christopher Kirker, wrote to members last week, informing them that in light of the “very unpleasant publicity which we all deplore” the club’s management was urgently considering the new legal advice, to see whether women should be admitted immediately.

 

“We are aware that there are strong views. But let us not be hasty. All is being carefully considered,” he wrote, adding that he would contact members again with further thoughts on 4 April.

 

This is not the first time that women have been nominated to the men-only club in the face of regulations prohibiting women from joining. In 2011 Hugh Bonneville proposed fellow actor Joanna Lumley; his decision to write her name in the book of proposed candidates triggered such anger among some of the club’s 1,500 members that the page was ripped out from the nomination book. Some members scrawled expletives on her nomination page, and one wrote: “Women aren’t allowed here and never will be.”

 

Mary Ann Sieghart, the author of The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, warned that nominating women was no guarantee that the club would allow them to join. The leading human rights lawyer Anthony Lester had hoped to propose her as a member in the later 1990s, but the then club chair blocked the suggestion (and took her for lunch in the club instead).

 

Responding to widespread bemusement about why there has been such an outcry about whether membership of a club for men in elite roles should be extended to women in similarly elite positions, she said: “The Garrick may be an elite club, but its membership matters precisely because it’s elite. Its members hold powerful positions in government, the judiciary, the media and the arts. These are people who run the country, and if women are excluded from this elite, then the establishment will remain overwhelmingly male. And that matters for all of us.”

REMEMBERING Sat 16 Sep 2023 : Garrick Club could admit women

 

Garrick could admit women after barrister U-turns on club rules

 

Michael Beloff KC judged in 2011 that reference to ‘he’ excluded women but has now concluded opposite

 

Clea Skopeliti

Sat 16 Sep 2023 18.24 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/16/garrick-could-admit-women-after-barrister-u-turns-on-club-rules

 

One of London’s last remaining gentlemen’s clubs, the Garrick, may be edging towards admitting women after a barrister performed a U-turn on a previous legal judgment ruling that they were ineligible for membership.

 

Michael Beloff KC first concluded that women could not be proposed under the club’s rules after Joanna Lumley was denied membership in 2011. He ruled then that although the rules do not explicitly preclude women from joining, they state that “no candidate shall be eligible unless he be proposed by one member and seconded by another”.

 

The use of the masculine article led Beloff to conclude that the rule could be interpreted as referring to men only, while he also said the club’s objectives also refer to “gentlemanly accomplishment and scholarship”.

 

But the rule could now be scrapped in the club, which was founded in 1831 and counts Benedict Cumberbatch and Sir Kingsley Amis among its members, after the KC wrote a new legal opinion, concluding the opposite.

 

Beloff prepared a new legal opinion in November last year, the Times reports, stating that there was “now a cogent argument” that the Law of Property Act 1925 means “he” and “she” can be used interchangeably in contracts.

 

“If so, there is no legal obstacle to the proposal of a woman for membership of the club by one member, seconded by another; nor, if she obtains the support required under the rules, any legal obstacle to her admission as a member of the club,” the newspaper quotes Beloff as writing. He reportedly warned that the club was “likely to provoke an expensive lawsuit” if it continued to exclude women from membership.

 

Although the opinion was delivered in November, many members only became aware of it recently, as the committee had not shared the news of Beloff’s revised judgment, the Times reports. Club members will share their views on women joining in a survey next month.

 

Emily Bendell, the chief executive and founder of a successful underwear brand, launched legal action against the club in 2020, arguing that its men-only membership rules are a breach of equality legislation, while Cherie Booth KC joined a campaign to force the club to admit women the following year.

 

Members including Stephen Fry, Damian Lewis and Hugh Bonneville have said they were in favour of extending membership to women, as has Michael Gove, the former justice secretary Ken Clarke, and broadcasters Sir Trevor McDonald, Melvyn Bragg and Jeremy Paxman. Three former Conservative MPs and 11 KCs were among those who said they would vote to continue to exclude female members.

 

The club, which was founded in 1831, last voted on whether to include women in 2015, when a majority of 50.5% voted in favour of introducing female membership. However, the introduction of a new rule at the Garrick requires a two-thirds majority.

 

The Garrick has been contacted for comment.

 

The Garrick Club was founded at a meeting in the Committee Room at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Wednesday 17 August 1831. Present were James Winston (a former strolling player, manager and important theatre antiquarian), Samuel James Arnold (a playwright and theatre manager), Samuel Beazley (an architect and playwright), General Sir Andrew Barnard (an army officer and hero of the Napoleonic Wars), and Francis Mills (a timber merchant and railway speculator). It was decided to write down a number of names in order to invite them to be original members of the Garrick Club.

 

The avowed purpose of the club was to "tend to the regeneration of the Drama".[2] It was to be a place where “actors and men of refinement could meet on equal terms” at a time when actors were not generally considered to be respectable members of society.

 

The club was named in honour of the actor David Garrick, whose acting and management at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in the previous century, had by the 1830s come to represent a golden age of British drama. Less than six months later the members had been recruited and a Club House found and equipped on King Street in Covent Garden. On 1 February 1832, it was reported that the novelist and journalist Thomas Gaspey was the first member to enter at 11am, and that “Mr Beazley gave the first order, (a mutton chop) at ½ past 12.”

 

The list of those who took up original membership runs like a Who’s Who of the Green Room for 1832: actors such as John Braham, Charles Kemble, William Macready, Charles Mathews and his son Charles James; the playwrights James Planché, Theodore Hook and Thomas Talfourd; scene-painters including Clarkson Frederick Stanfield and Thomas Grieve. Even the patron, the Duke of Sussex, had an element of the theatrical about him, being a well-known mesmerist. To this can be added numerous Barons, Counts, Dukes, Earls and Lords, soldiers, parliamentarians and judges.

 

The membership would later include Charles Kean, Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Arthur Sullivan, J. M. Barrie, Arthur Wing Pinero, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. From the literary world came writers such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, H. G. Wells, A. A. Milne (who on his death in 1956 bequeathed the club a quarter of the royalties from his children’s books),and Kingsley Amis. The visual arts has been represented by painters such as John Everett Millais, Lord Leighton and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

 

 The club in 1864

The club’s popularity at the beginning of the 1860s created overcrowding of its original clubhouse. Slum clearance being undertaken just round the corner provided the opportunity to move into a brand-new purpose-built home on what became known as Garrick Street. The move was completed in 1864 and the club remains in this building today.

 

All new candidates must be proposed by an existing member before election in a secret ballot, the original assurance of the committee being “that it would be better that ten unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted”. This exclusive nature of the club was highlighted when reporter Jeremy Paxman applied to join but was initially blackballed, though he was later admitted, an experience he shares with Henry Irving who despite being the first actor to receive a knighthood had himself been blackballed in 1873.

 

When the club was founded in 1831 Rule 1 of the Garrick Club Rules and Regulations called for the "formation of a theatrical Library, with works on costume". At a General Meeting on 15 October 1831, the barrister John Adolphus suggested that members should present their duplicate dramatic works to the club, and that these should go some way towards forming a Library. A very valuable collection has thus come together over the years, and its special collections are particularly strong on eighteenth and nineteenth-century theatre.

 

James Winston, the first Secretary and Librarian of the club, was one of the principal early benefactors and his gifts included minutes from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as well as his own Theatric Tourist. These presentations formed the nucleus of a Library which now holds well over 10,000 items, including plays, manuscripts, prints (bound into numerous extra-illustrated volumes), and many photographs.

L'appartement parisien de Karl Lagerfeld aux enchères le 26 mars | AFP / Karl Lagerfeld’s futuristic Paris apartment sells for €10m

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Karl Lagerfeld’s futuristic Paris apartment sells for €10m

 

The late fashion designer lived at the flat overlooking the Seine River for a decade

 

Agence France-Presse in Paris

Tue 26 Mar 2024 16.50 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2024/mar/26/karl-lagerfelds-futuristic-paris-apartment-sells-for-10m-euros

 

The futuristic Paris apartment of the late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has been sold for €10m (£8.5m) at auction.

 

The final price, €11m including notary fees, was roughly double the guide price, set at €5.3m. No details were given of the buyer.

 

Located in a 17th-century building on Quai Voltaire, the three-room home has a view overlooking the Seine River and the Louvre museum.

 

The apartment of 260 sq m has a 50 sq m dressing room and was completely refurbished by Lagerfeld “in a futuristic style with a concrete floor and sections of sandblasted glass”, according to the notary.

 

German-born Lagerfeld, whose spectacular creations and shows for Chanel, Fendi and his own brand had a profound impact on the fashion world, lived there for about 10 years until his death aged 85 in February 2019.

 

His office and library is now open to the public as a bookshop and event space in the Latin Quarter of Paris.

 

A series about his life, Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, starring Daniel Brühl, is due to stream on Disney+ in June.

 

In an interview with AFP earlier this month, Bruhl said he had tried to emulate Lagerfeld’s extreme aesthete tastes.

 

“I tried my best … but the furniture, the posters, the photographs, the paintings, the books … to be such a perfectionist in aesthetics is something I absolutely share, but obviously I’m useless in comparison,” Brühl said.