Holland & Sherry have been trading cloth since 1836, which makes them one of the oldest cloth merchants still working, and their bunches are usually the first thing we open when a customer wants a suit that has to survive a Chennai year. The reason is Crispaire. It is their high-twist worsted, and very little we handle holds a press through a full day the way it does, or gets you out of a car at 2pm still looking like you did at nine. If you have ever taken your jacket off in a meeting because you couldn't sit in it, this is the kind of cloth that fixes that. We'll show you the rest of the range too, but Crispaire is where the conversation usually starts.
Founded 1836, and a merchant rather than a mill
Holland & Sherry started in London in 1836, just as Savile Row was settling into its role as the centre of bespoke tailoring. They never wove cloth themselves. They bought the best wool they could find from British and international producers, put the weaving out to mills they trusted, supervised the finishing, and sold the finished piece to the tailors of the Row.
That difference is worth understanding when you are choosing cloth. A merchant at this level doesn't just buy and resell. They set the yarn, the construction, the weight, the finish and the handle on every piece they carry. What reaches our shelf is a range wider and steadier than any single mill could weave on its own, backed by nearly two centuries of arguing with tailors about what actually works.
Holland & Sherry work today out of London and Edinburgh, with showrooms internationally and standing relationships with the best wool-producing regions and weaving partners around the world. When a tailor tells you a suit is Holland & Sherry cloth, that name is the tailor putting his own reputation behind the material.
Crispaire, and why it matters in Chennai
Crispaire is the most useful cloth Holland & Sherry make for anyone living in a climate like ours. It is a high-twist worsted, built from a two-fold yarn spun to a 36/2nm count and woven plain. The yarns are twisted hard before weaving, so the cloth has a dry, round, faintly grainy handle rather than the flat smoothness of an ordinary worsted.
You feel that on a bad day. At 26°C in a meeting room, or walking two buildings down in Chennai heat, a Crispaire jacket stays wearable where a flat worsted of the same weight has already gone clammy. The hard twist also fights creasing, because yarn under tension wants to spring back, so the suit still reads as pressed after a day of sitting, driving and standing about.
It is not a quiet cloth. The surface has texture and it looks like itself from across a room. If you want a suit nobody notices, pick something else. If you want a suit that works and looks deliberate, this is it. In charcoal, navy or mid-grey it photographs well and takes hard wear.
One point of order, since the two get confused constantly. Fresco is not a Holland & Sherry cloth. It is a registered name, trademarked in 1907 by Martin Sons & Co of Huddersfield, and it belongs today to Hardy Minnis. Crispaire is Holland & Sherry's own answer to the same problem. Both are high-twist, both are honest choices for Chennai, and they handle differently enough that it is worth putting them side by side. We will do exactly that if you ask.
The rest of the Holland & Sherry book
There is a lot more in the range than Crispaire. Their tropical worsteds, fine merino in a plain weave at 200–240 gsm, are about as versatile as suiting gets for someone who wears a jacket most days of the year. The pattern books cover the whole classic business vocabulary: chalk stripes, fine pin stripes, glen plaids, window-panes, herringbones, and a set of checks that carry the British pattern tradition without shouting about it.
Higher up the range they offer Super 120s and above in plains and patterns, cloths that feel fine in the hand but keep the durability their sourcing guarantees. This is what to pick for a suit you plan to keep and wear to the things that matter, in colours and patterns that will not look dated in eight years.
Their tweeds are worth a look if you travel to colder places or want a sporting jacket for the Chennai cool season. The Lovat tweed, a mixed-colour herringbone in natural wool tones, is one of the best things in the whole book and one of the easiest tweeds to actually wear.
Why we keep Holland & Sherry on the shelf
Holland & Sherry cloth is not cheap and was never meant to be. You are paying for wool that has been sourced, specified and finished to a standard the fussiest tailors in the world rely on. A suit cut from it can honestly be called the best British suiting material you can buy.
We stock it because the quality does not wobble from bunch to bunch, the range covers everything we get asked for, and Crispaire answers the one problem every tailor in Chennai has to solve. Very little we have handled behaves as well in heat and humidity while still looking right for a boardroom or a wedding.
Our Holland & Sherry bunches cover the full seasonal spread, from the lighter tropicals through standard worsteds to the mid-weights that make sense from November to February. Come in, tell us what the suit is for, and we'll pull the relevant pieces and let you handle them. You can feel the difference between a high-twist and a plain worsted in about half a minute.
