Huddersfield Fine Worsteds

Classic English suiting and Fresco travel cloth

Huddersfield Fine Worsteds is a young name on old foundations. The company was formed in 1976, when several historic cloth houses came together, and the family tree runs deep. Hunt & Winterbotham was making cloth at Cam Mills in Gloucestershire as early as 1532. Martin Sons & Co traces its heritage to the 1840s, when Patrick Martin arrived from Belfast and set up in the Yorkshire cloth town.

Martin Sons gave the trade one of its most copied ideas. In 1907 the firm invented and registered Fresco, the original travel cloth, and the recipe has not changed in over a century. Hardy Minnis, another of the group's houses, has held the Royal Warrant for supplying cloth to the Royal Household since the 1930s, which is the kind of customer that keeps standards honest.

The cloth itself is classic English suiting: firm and dry, built for structure. It holds a pressed crease and a clean shoulder line through a long day rather than softening into one. If you want a suit with shoulders that mean it, this is where we start.

We keep HFW bunches in the cloth library for exactly that brief. Ask to handle the Fresco book at a fitting. It remains the obvious choice for a suit that has to travel.