Linton Tweeds produce luxurious, fantasy tweed fabrics in innovative structures for fashion houses around the world, and all fabrics are designed and woven on site at the mill in Carlisle. Linton Tweeds works with fashion houses in London, Milan and New York, in markets across Europe, North America and Asia, and with luxury brands such as Burberry and Chanel – which they have worked alongside ever since their founder William Linton was introduced to Coco Chanel in 1924.

Linton Tweeds – visual board by UKFT

Managing Director Keith Walker on the impact of lockdown on thriving business

“On the 20th of March when the COVID-19 lockdown arrived the Linton Collection was selling at record levels and our collaboration with customers stronger than ever. Such an immediate stop to all production was quite obviously a serious blow and our supply from Italian based yarn producers looked precarious.

Taking advantage of the Government-backed furlough scheme for the majority of our staff gave us some breathing space to adapt our workspaces to ensure social distancing, hand washing and temperature checking when everyone returned.

Our staff began to return at the end of April, firstly working hard to finish the outstanding backlog of orders for those customers confident of their sales and then for new orders mostly from Asia. The pick-up in business has in fact been very encouraging and has highlighted the benefit of such close co-operation with our customers.

The UK and US markets have now joined the renaissance and when the summer ends we are very hopeful that the European countries will follow suit. We have adapted our collection to a website that can be directly accessed by customers and there is the added benefit of the instant publication of all our new designs.

On the whole this unprecedented emergency has forced us to accelerate & improve our online presence which should stand us in good stead when the boom arrives in 2021.”

Hear from the team

The working environment at Linton is very creative – as a design team we enjoy sourcing exciting new fancy yarns to produce innovative fabrics in house. I love the challenge of working closely with customers and yarn suppliers to create the designs they are looking for”.

Irene Steele, Senior Designer at Linton Tweeds

Irene talks us through the Linton Tweeds A/W 21/22 collection:

“We have taken inspiration from 3 different art movements – Arts and Crafts, Pop Art and Renaissance (mainly looking at the Palace of Versailles). These are used as initial ideas of colour groupings, textures, patterns.

Arts and Crafts – a wide range of rich colours from natural, organic forms, with lots of texture and colour. There is a good mix of natural and fancy yarns to provide surface interest.

Pop Art – bright clashing colours and flat surfaces. Splashes of neon colours, pom pom yarns and sequins.

Renaissance – looking at interiors from Palace of Versailles and the fabrics/fashions from this era. Opulent colours, ranging from darks to sugary pastels with lots of metallics and fancy yarns to create surface embellishment. 

Addressing the issues surrounding sustainability, we continue to incorporate more organic and recycled yarns including wool, cotton, polyester and polyamide.  We have invested in new machinery, specifically in finishing and twisting, which is much more efficient than previously, accessing all water for finishing and dyeing from a bore hole, and have been introducing recycled/recyclable packaging. We are also introducing more and more fancy yarns with higher traceability, which are either fully or in part recycled, and bio/organic yarns replacing many of our more basic yarns”.

Stock services – fabrics ready for immediate delivery can be viewed at www.lintondirect.co.uk, and the main range can be viewed at www.lintonstudio.com (prior to viewing customers must contact the company for a password to access this). These are not in stock but woven to order.

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