What Remains: Karandeep Mattu on CWT, Leicester Manufacturing and Making Clothes to Last.
Clothes have a peculiar relationship with time.
A chair can acquire a scratch. A watch can gather patina. A house can settle into itself. But clothing spends its life against the body, absorbing the evidence of wherever we take it: Rain, heat, movement, work, washing, repetition. Eventually, the distinction between the thing we bought and the life we have lived in it becomes rather difficult to maintain.
Most fashion is designed to resist this process.
It arrives new, immaculate and already finished. Its appeal is often concentrated in the first encounter - the untouched fabric, the precise colour, the feeling of possibility before the garment has acquired any history of its own.
There is another way of thinking about clothes.
It begins not in a showroom but at a cutting table.
Leicester has been thinking about clothing from that end for generations. The city's textile history is vast, but its most important legacy may not be the factories themselves. It is the knowledge that accumulated inside them - among cutters, machinists, pattern makers, mechanics and the people who learned to understand cloth through thousands of hours of handling it.
Much of that world has disappeared.
Factories closed. Production moved elsewhere. The vocabulary of manufacturing survived rather better than manufacturing itself. Today, words such as craftsmanship, premium and luxury are used with remarkable enthusiasm, sometimes to describe things whose makers remain almost entirely invisible.
A factory is less susceptible to euphemism.
A seam either holds. A pattern either works. A fabric behaves as expected or it doesn't. There is little room for adjectives when a needle meets cloth.
This is the world into which CWT was born.
The Mattu family's manufacturing story in Leicester stretches back to 1972, when Karandeep's grandfather and his brother arrived from India and began building a business around clothing production. Three generations later, the factory remains the centre of the enterprise. Karandeep grew up around the machinery and the material, learning the peculiar grammar of garments from the people who made them rather than from the people who sold them.
That proximity changes the questions.
When you have spent enough time making clothes, the finished object becomes difficult to separate from everything that went into it. The fabric has a provenance beyond the label. A construction detail may represent decades of accumulated knowledge. A machinist's apparent instinct can be the result of thousands of repetitions. What looks simple from the outside may be the end product of an extraordinary amount of invisible thought.
There is an old philosophical distinction between knowing that something works and knowing how to do it. The latter is harder to describe, harder to automate and almost impossible to recover once a generation stops passing it on.
Clothing is full of this tacit knowledge.
CWT's decision to make garments under its own name brings that knowledge into view, but without turning the factory into a museum piece. The ambition is not to recreate a lost Leicester, nor to dress contemporary clothing in the costume of heritage. It is something more difficult: to determine which parts of an inherited way of making things still deserve a future.
That question becomes particularly interesting in an industry organised around acceleration.
New collections arrive before old ones have properly settled. Fabrics are engineered to feel remarkable immediately. Trends shorten their own lifespan. A garment can be made obsolete without having physically changed at all.
CWT operates according to a different measure of time.
Not the season, but the years.
The kind of time in which cotton changes under repeated washing. Colours lose their initial certainty. A familiar garment becomes inseparable from the person who wears it. The kind of time in which manufacturing knowledge passes from one generation to another, not as an instruction manual but as a standard.
Perhaps that is the more interesting definition of longevity: not simply that something survives, but that it remains worth living with.
We spoke with Karandeep Mattu, founder of CWT, about Leicester, family, manufacturing and the accumulated knowledge contained within the deceptively simple act of making a garment.
CWT began with a family factory and three generations of manufacturing experience. What changed when you moved from making clothing for other brands to putting your own name on the label?
Karandeep Mattu: Necessity, really.
CWT started during COVID as a way to keep the factory sewing. The idea of starting our own brand had always been in the back of my mind, but if COVID hadn't happened, I'm not sure CWT ever would have started.
Suddenly I had the time to think about it properly, but more importantly, I needed something to put through the factory and give the machinists work. That was the push that turned an idea I'd had for years into something real.
What I didn't expect was how different it would feel putting our own name on the label.
When you're manufacturing for somebody else, your responsibility is to make their product as well as you possibly can. But ultimately they decide the fabric, the fit, the price and where compromises are made.
With CWT, there was nowhere to hide. Every decision was ours.
It meant we could take everything we'd learnt over three generations of manufacturing and ask a very simple question: Can we sell this for the next 10 years.
That's probably still the question behind every CWT product today.
COVID gave us the reason to start CWT. Putting our own name on the label gave us the freedom and the responsibility to make things exactly how we thought they should be made.
Having spent decades on the factory floor, has proximity to manufacturing changed your view of the increasingly elastic language of fashion - particularly words such as “luxury”, “premium” and “craftsmanship”?
Karandeep Mattu: I think real luxury is found in the hidden details. Something that might never be seen by the person wearing the garment, but somebody has still taken the time to do properly.
To me, that's craftsmanship.
It's the way a seam is constructed, how a pattern has been cut, the tension of the fabric when it's laid, or an extra process that might take longer but ultimately makes the garment fit better or last longer. None of those things necessarily make for a good marketing photograph, but they're the things that turn words like “luxury” and “craftsmanship” into something physical.
The strange thing is, when I first started working in the factory, I took all of that for granted. I'd grown up around people who had been making clothes for decades, so these small details were just normal to me. It was simply how things were done.
It was only later, as words like “luxury”, “premium” and “craftsmanship” started appearing everywhere, that I began to look more seriously at the invisible work I'd been surrounded by my whole life.
Manufacturing gives you a slightly different perspective because ultimately the garment doesn't care what you call it. You can call something luxury, but turn it inside out and the work is either there or it isn't.
That's probably what luxury means to me now. Not a price, a logo or a word on a website, but the time and care somebody was willing to put into something even when they knew nobody might ever notice.
CWT’s substantial cotton, minimal treatment and emphasis on allowing garments to develop through wear suggest a rather unfashionable idea: that good things should improve with age. Why is that philosophy important to you?
Karandeep Mattu: Good things come to those who wait, right?
We think good clothing should have a life beyond the moment you buy it.
A lot of clothing is designed to impress you on day one. Fabrics are softened, finished and treated to create an immediate feeling of quality. But those treatments disappear, and often the thing you loved when you first bought it isn't the thing you're left with six months later.
We'd rather do the opposite.
We like substantial cottons that might feel a little firmer at first, but soften naturally through washing and wear. The colour changes, the fabric relaxes and eventually the garment starts to take on the character of the person wearing it.
I think that philosophy comes from growing up around manufacturing. You learn not to judge something solely by how it feels when it's brand new. You judge it by what happens after it's been worn and washed fifty times.
For me, that's a much more interesting definition of quality.
We're not trying to make the perfect garment for the day you buy it. We're trying to make one that you like even more a few years later.
Leicester has a remarkable textile history, much of which has disappeared. How important is CWT’s connection to British manufacturing, and do you see yourselves as preserving a craft tradition or reinventing it?
Karandeep Mattu: The connection is incredibly important to us, but I don't think we're interested in preserving British manufacturing for the sake of nostalgia.
Our family has been making clothes in Leicester since 1972. At that time, manufacturing was everywhere. There were factories, machinists, cutters, mechanics, fabric merchants - an entire ecosystem of knowledge and skill around you. A lot of that has disappeared.
What concerns me isn't necessarily the loss of the factories themselves. It's losing the knowledge inside them. You can buy another sewing machine. It's much harder to replace somebody who has spent forty years understanding how to cut cloth, how a fabric behaves or how a garment needs to be constructed.
So I see our responsibility as taking that knowledge forward rather than simply preserving it.
The decision to keep the factory operating during COVID had consequences beyond production, protecting jobs and accumulated skills. Did that experience change how you think about the human value contained within a garment?
Karandeep Mattu: Before COVID, I think I understood the value of manufacturing mainly through the product, the fabric, the construction and the skill required to make something properly.
COVID made me understand the value of the people behind it.
When the orders stopped, closing the factory would have been the obvious business decision. But some of the people working with us had spent decades learning their craft. These weren't skills you could replace when things returned to normal.
Keeping the factory going became about more than keeping machines running. It was about protecting livelihoods and knowledge.
I think that's changed the way I look at clothes. When you pick up a garment, you're not just holding cotton and thread. You're holding someone's time and experience. A cutter might make something look effortless because they've been doing it for forty years. A machinist knows instinctively how a fabric needs to be handled because they've sewn thousands of garments before yours.
Most of that is completely invisible in the finished product.
COVID was ultimately what pushed us to start CWT. We had the factory, we had the people, and we had the knowledge. We decided that rather than let those skills disappear, we'd use them to make something of our own.
That's probably why the human side of manufacturing has become such an important part of CWT.
CWT’s proposition is remarkably simple - make fewer, better things and remove much of the machinery of fashion between maker and wearer. In an industry addicted to novelty, how difficult is it to resist adding something simply because the market expects it?
Karandeep Mattu: It's difficult, because the whole industry is built around giving people a reason to buy something new.
There's always pressure to launch another colour, another style, another collection. And as a business, of course you feel that. We have a factory to run, people to employ and targets we need to hit.
But having our own factory has also taught us how much work goes into making even the simplest garment properly. Once you understand that, it becomes difficult to justify making something simply because you need something new to talk about.
So we try to ask a different question: Can we sell this for the next 10 years.
Your family story stretches back to your grandfather establishing the business after arriving from India in the 1960s. If he could walk through CWT today, what would you hope he recognised immediately?
Karandeep Mattu: I'd hope he recognised the mentality.
The factory would look different. The machines are different, the clothes are different and obviously the world we're selling them into is completely different. But I'd like to think he'd recognise the way we approach the work.
My grandfather came to this country with very little and built something through hard work, skill and persistence. There weren't shortcuts available to him. You turned up, learnt your trade and tried to do things properly.
I think that mentality still exists in CWT.
We obsess over details most people will never notice. We spend too long getting things right. And we're still surrounded by people who take enormous pride in what they make.
I'd also hope he'd recognise that we're still a factory.
We've built a brand around it and our name is now on the label, but underneath all of that we're still cutting fabric, sewing garments and solving the same little problems that have existed in clothing manufacturing forever.
A lot has changed in three generations.
I'd hope the standards haven't.
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Words and questions by AW.
Answers courtesy of Karandeep Mattu.
Photo courtesy of CWT.
