Söktaş

Premium cotton shirting from the Aegean

Söktaş is that rare thing in shirting: a mill that grows its own cotton. The company weaves in Söke, in Turkey's Aegean region, and the founding family have farmed cotton in the Meander Valley since the early 1870s, a century before the mill itself opened in the early 1970s.

That long acquaintance with the fibre shows up as control. Growing, spinning, weaving and finishing all happen within the one operation, so the cloth that reaches our cutting table has answered to a single set of standards from field to bolt.

The house made its point plainly with Meander 71, a superfine cotton bred on its own farms to stand against the prized Egyptian varieties. The wider book runs from crisp business shirtings to softer casual weaves, with organic and regenerative cotton lines for clients who ask where their fibre comes from.

In the hand, Söktaş cloth is full and smooth, and it takes fine patterns cleanly. We reach for it when a shirt brief calls for quiet quality: cloth that looks composed at the first wearing and, more to the point, at the two hundredth wash.