Support England in More Ways Than One

‍It's been quite a fortnight for flag waving.

Arthur Fery, the wildcard nobody outside tennis circles had heard of two weeks ago, went from unknown to Wimbledon semi-finalist before Alexander Zverev brought the fairytale to an end in straight sets on Friday afternoon. SW19 adopted him like he'd been ours for years (turns out he basically has, having lived a mile from the All England Club since he was a month old).

Silverstone too just had a record breaking crowds and England are giving it everything at a World Cup.

We are, collectively, brilliant at getting behind a British team, win or lose.

We like buying British too. "Buy British" does something to us emotionally that no other label quite manages, tea towels, wax jackets, biscuit tins, all of it.

So here's the question nagging at us this week: if we love the flag so much, why don't we love the factory?

The gap between buying British and making British

We're very good at buying the idea of Britishness, less good at paying for the reality of it, the person on the sewing machine, the pattern cutter, the mill. The vast majority of clothing sold in the UK is made overseas, despite fashion and textiles being a genuine British success story on paper, a £62 billion contributor to UK GDP and 1.3 million jobs, according to a report by UKFT and Oxford Economics. The industry that clothes the nation barely makes any of what it sells here.

It's a deepening problem too. UK clothing manufacturing revenue has been contracting at around 2.5% a year, and the number of businesses in the sector has fallen at roughly 2.1% annually since 2021, leaving under 4,000 clothing manufacturers standing. Leicester, once the heart of British garment production, tells the story in miniature: around 700 factories were operating five years ago, compared to somewhere between 60 and 100 today. Some of that is self-inflicted, a genuine exploitation scandal did real damage to the city's reputation, but underneath it sits the same story every UK manufacturer tells, retailers demanding ever lower prices while wages, National Insurance, rent and electricity have only gone up.

Zoom out and it's the same picture nationally. The UK has lost around 200,000 manufacturing jobs since 2010, roughly one in twenty of the jobs that existed, with textiles and clothing hit harder than most, one of the first industries to get the "chasing the cheap needle round the planet" treatment, as one Parliamentary inquiry rather brilliantly put it.

What we actually lost isn't just factories

It's tempting to file this as pure economics, cheaper labour abroad, pricier labour here. But that misses what's been lost along the way: skill. Pattern cutting, grading, industrial machining, tailoring, finishing, these are hand skills passed down person to person, and once a generation stops learning them, they don't come back easily.

Jenny Holloway has spent nearly two decades trying to plug that gap. Her London factory and social enterprise, Fashion Enter, trains apprentices in stitching, pattern cutting and garment tech alongside a live production floor, and even opened a second site in Wales to re-employ skilled staff made redundant when Laura Ashley's factory closed. Education and manufacturing under one roof, because the industry spent years glamorising design while quietly running out of people who can make the thing.

Kate Hills has fought a version of the same battle since 2011, when she left a career designing for Burberry and M&S and set up Make it British instead. Her mission is blunt: connect small brands with the UK manufacturers still standing before they disappear. Over a decade she's built a directory, a trade show, a podcast and a coaching programme around proving that making locally can still be commercially sane, not just sentimentally nice.

Then there's Salli Deighton, who spent decades in denim at Wrangler, Lee, M&S and ASOS before founding LaundRe, the UK's first small batch denim finishing laundry, based in a converted East London church. Denim used to be washed and finished here as standard; that whole piece of the supply chain vanished abroad along with the factories. LaundRe brings it back using laser, ozone and low-water technology, letting brands finish or rescue unsold stock onshore instead of shipping it to Turkey and back. As Deighton puts it, most UK buyers today have never seen the machines that make their own product.

Three women, three corners of the industry, circling the same hole: capacity and skill that walked out of the door decades ago, and a supply chain now working out how to grow it back.

The cost nobody put on the label

Offshoring wasn't just a jobs story, it was environmental too. Since the 1980s, brands have chased low labour costs and weaker environmental governance overseas, helped by a 90% fall in shipping costs since the 1950s. Every one of those freight miles has a carbon cost a locally made garment doesn't carry.

There's a human cost as well. A House of Commons inquiry heard that Leicester garment workers were routinely paid £3.50 to £5 an hour, an "open secret" regulators weren't resourced to police. Cheap doesn't mean the cost disappears, it just moves somewhere less visible to the person buying the T-shirt.

The skills cost compounds too, because it's generational. A pattern cutter who never trains an apprentice retires with decades of knowledge nobody inherits.

So what closes the gap?

None of this is an argument against imported clothing, and none of these three women would pretend otherwise, offshore manufacturing supports millions of livelihoods elsewhere. But there's a real, sizeable opportunity in the gap between what we say we want (British made, traceable, ethical) and what we actually buy (mostly imported, mostly unseen). High end UK manufacturing capacity is reportedly already booked up to six months in advance, and rising costs, Brexit friction and looming Extended Producer Responsibility rules are pushing more brands to ask the question again.

What actually moves the needle, watching what Holloway, Hills and Deighton have each built, is refreshingly simple: training people, connecting the businesses still standing with brands who want to buy from them, and building the infrastructure, laundries, pattern cutting studios, apprenticeships, that lets "made in Britain" be a genuine option again, not just a line stitched onto something made somewhere else entirely.

We already know how to get behind a British underdog, Arthur Fery proved that again this week. The harder, more useful ask is sending an ounce of that same energy to whoever actually made the shirt on your back when you cheer that team or sports personality on.

Our Fashion Fix works with buying and commercial teams to make sustainability the language of commercial strategy, not a separate agenda.

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