Fox Brothers have been making cloth in the same Somerset town since 1772, and they still weave it themselves in England rather than buying it in. They are the house credited with creating flannel for suits, and flannel is what most people come to them for. We will be straight with you about that: a Fox flannel at 400 to 430 grams is a beautiful thing and you will wear it perhaps four weeks a year in Chennai, and only if you travel. What we order from Fox for customers who live here is Fox Air, their tropical worsted, which is a completely different proposition. Both are worth knowing about, for very different reasons.
Founded 1772, and still a working mill
Thomas Fox became a partner in his family's Wellington cloth business in 1772 and sole proprietor in 1796. The trade behind him was older still. The Were family, his forebears, had been making serge in that corner of Somerset since the 1600s. Fox moved the operation to Tonedale, beside the River Tone, and built it into one of the largest cloth manufacturers in Britain, running several mills across the county at its height.
What matters for you is the word mill. Fox Brothers are weavers. Cloth is designed and woven at their own plant in Wellington rather than commissioned from someone else and sold under a house name. Very few British firms can still say that, and it is why their pattern archive, which runs back to the founding, is a working reference rather than a museum.
The military history is part of the story too. Fox held a First World War contract for hundreds of miles of khaki cloth for army puttees, and their chalkstripe went to Winston Churchill. The company is small now, a few dozen people, and was bought in 2009 by Deborah Meaden and Douglas Cordeaux, who kept the weaving in Somerset rather than moving it.
Flannel, and when you can actually wear it
Flannel is a milled woollen cloth with a slightly raised, brushed surface. It has no shine, it drapes with real weight, and it hides a crease better than any smooth worsted. Fox make the reference version. Their 1772 Flannel, woven in merino and cashmere, sits at 400 to 430 grams. The Classic Flannel book runs across mixed weights in mélange shades and traditional patterns.
Now the honest part. A cloth at 430 grams is unwearable in Chennai for around eleven months of the year. It is not a matter of taste or toughness. It is a heavy woollen cloth built for a cold, damp country, and putting one on in April here would be an act of self-harm. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you cloth rather than advising you.
So we sell Fox flannel for specific reasons. A charcoal flannel suit for a customer who spends the winter in Delhi, London or Toronto. A grey flannel trouser for someone who travels for work through European autumns. A flannel jacket for the two or three weeks in late December and January when Chennai actually gets pleasant in the evenings. Ordered for those reasons, it is the right cloth. Ordered as a general-purpose suit, it will hang in your cupboard.
Their Fox City book at around 300 grams is the sensible middle. It is a three-season cloth in a cooler country and a cool-weather and air-conditioning cloth here, which for a lot of our customers is more useful than a full flannel.
Fox Air, the Fox cloth for this city
Fox Air is a tropical suiting woven from two-ply up-twisted worsted yarn in a plain weave, in merino. Twisting the yarn hard before weaving gives the cloth a dry, crisp handle and a strong resistance to creasing, and the plain open construction lets air move through it. It is the same principle behind every good hot-weather worsted, executed by a mill that has been weaving wool for two and a half centuries.
In wear that means a suit that survives a Chennai working day and a flight. It comes out of a bag looking like a suit. It does not go limp at 3pm. The dry handle also means it does not cling when you are damp, which anyone who has walked from a car park in May will appreciate more than any technical description.
The Fox Air book is not just plain navies either. It carries checks, pinstripes, glen checks and window-panes, so you can have some pattern in a cloth that is still sensible for the climate. For a first Fox commission for a customer who lives here, this is where we start.
How we use Fox at Sellers
Fox is the cloth we reach for when someone wants something with a bit of history behind it and is willing to hear an honest answer about when they can wear it. The mill is small, the cloth is English-woven, and the character is unmistakable next to a smooth Italian worsted.
Our usual advice runs like this. If the suit has to work in Chennai all year, Fox Air. If you travel to cold places on business, a Fox City or a flannel suit is money well spent and will last twenty years. If you want one Fox jacket for the cool season and for weddings in hill stations, a flannel or a tweed jacket is a fine thing to own and you will look forward to the weather that lets you wear it.
We can order across the Fox books. Come in, tell us where the garment is actually going to be worn, and we will point you at the right weight rather than the prettiest swatch.