Mafatlal is older than most of the European names on our shelf, which surprises people. Mafatlal Gagalbhai founded it in 1905, well before independence, and it became one of the handful of houses that effectively built the modern Indian textile industry. It is still weaving, and its shirting in particular is worth a customer's attention.
1905, and a very long run
Mafatlal Industries was established in 1905 by Mafatlal Gagalbhai. To put that in context, it predates Ermenegildo Zegna by five years and Raymond by twenty. It is one of the genuinely old textile houses of the world, and it happens to be Indian.
The house has been through more than a century of Indian industrial history and has diversified a long way from where it began, but cloth is still the centre of it.
Yarn-dyed shirtings, voiles and more
The range is wide: yarn-dyed shirtings, suitings, voiles, prints, linens, bleached whites, denims, corduroys, uniform cloth and home textiles.
For us the shirting is the interesting part, especially the yarn-dyed cloth and the voiles. Yarn-dyed means the thread is coloured before weaving rather than the finished cloth being dyed after, which is how you get a stripe or a check that stays crisp and does not go muddy after a year of washing. In Chennai, where shirts are washed constantly, that is worth paying attention to.
When we open Mafatlal
For work shirting in quantity, for voiles in the hot months, and for uniform and corporate orders where the cloth has to survive industrial laundering.
Mafatlal cloth is available to order through us.