Soktas

Aegean cotton shirting, from field to bolt

Soktas is that rare thing in shirting, a house that grows its own cotton. It weaves at Söke, in Turkey's Aegean region, and the founding family have farmed cotton in the Meander Valley since the early 1870s. The spinning mill followed a century later, in 1973, the fiftieth year of the Turkish Republic.

That long acquaintance with the fibre shows as control. In 1992 the house turned to yarn-dyed cloth, chiefly shirting, and built its own dyeing and finishing works. Growing, spinning, weaving and finishing all happen within the one house, so the cloth that reaches our cutting table has answered to a single standard from field to bolt.

It made its point plainly with Meander 71, a superfine cotton bred on its own farms to rival the prized Egyptian varieties. The wider book runs from crisp business shirtings to softer casual weaves.

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