Thomas Mason

A collection of high quality fabrics, that express the traditional but slightly whimsical English elegance.

England, late 18th century. Sir Thomas Mason was one of the leading figures of the English textile industry, who started business at the height of the Industrial Revolution.

He was a far-sighted man with a flair for seizing opportunities in a sector that had previously relied strongly on manual methods alone.

In the Pennine hills between Yorkshire and Lancashire, textiles had been manufactured for centuries using ancient techniques:
Spinning was carried out manually in homes and stables and fabrics were subsequently woven using hand looms.

Towards the end of the 1700s, inventors succeeded in mechanising textile equipment, thus hugely increasing productivity, due partly to the use of hydraulic energy.

In the same period, an important canal was built linking Liverpool to Leeds, Yorkshire’s textile centre, where arrived the first boats loaded with cotton from the West Indies docked in.

In 1796, sensing the potential of the moment, Sir Thomas Mason founded in Leeds one of the first factories to manufacture cotton shirt fabric.

These fabrics, which even then were of a high quality, were used by London’s West End tailors serving the aristocracy and the upper class, before being exported throughout the British Empire and all over the world

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