Factory Talk: Panther celebrates the fabric’s heart
A mill is a mill, some might say. Well, yes and no. The choice of equipment affects the quality, says Tilmann Wröbel. He heads to China to discover a company that has all the components to craft great denim
When thinking about great denim mills, one might think about Japan and Italy, but other countries, such as India or China, also have state-of-the-art denim mills. Let me introduce you to Panther Denim, a mill founded in China in the early 1980s by a group of three friends. These three textile professionals were driven by the idea of creating the best denim fabrication possible, better than the local fabrics that were available then. They invested into building a denim mill on their own, which quickly became China’s benchmark denim mill.
If you are familiar with the mechanics of making fantastic denim fabric, then you know you need to be able to master all aspects of the fabric, from the cotton fibre to the yarn, to dyeing, weaving and finishing.
Let’s start with the fibre. To ensure the endurance of your denim, nothing is better than working with a premium long-fibre cotton. For this, you need to have a ginning section, in which you choose the right fibre quality, depending on the origin of the cotton. The process of ginning the cotton bales separates lint from seed and allows you to blend different types of cotton, if you wish. The cotton is then transformed into yarn, where the desired amount and rhythm of slubs and naps is processed.
From gin to spin
Yes, many mills do source yarn from yarnmakers, but spinning your own yarn from your own cotton ensures that the true heart of the fabric is the standard you require. If the cotton is poor and the fibre is short, your fabric will stretch, once worn. That is why at Panther, the conception of the fabric starts at the conception of the yarn and the selection of relevant cotton.
During this process, stretch fabrics are blended with elastane or Lycra (in various, sometimes patent pending, methods). Lyocel or technical fibres might be added at this stage.
The yarn becomes cones of ecru for the weft yarn, or is prepared for the indigo dye of the warp fabric. Here again, various methods come into play. The simplest and fastest way is the ‘slasher’ (or sheet) dyeing, which is fantastic for easy-to-wash fabrics. Or there is the more traditional and sanctified rope-dyeing, where the indigo is treated in bundles and gets extra ‘air-time’ to oxidise to provide the deepest indigo colours. At Panther, both dyeing techniques and types of machine exist, and enable the mill to provide a broad offer of fabrics for heritage products or fast and easily washable indigos.
Dye process
Each time I visit a mill, I really enjoy watching the dyeing process, with the yarn first turning green and then becoming indigo-blue during the oxidising process. In the Panther mill, an entire laboratory works on the different hues of blue. It is particularly important when it comes to sustainable indigo dyeing to achieve a wide variety of hues, from red to green casts. These blue hues are tested many times so the fabric, once washed down from the raw colour, will have a coherent blue in its lighter, washed versions.
Once the yarn is ready for weaving, the concept of the fabric comes to life.
A mill like Panther needs to have a large variety of different warp yarns available, to mix these with an appropriate weft yarn to create the right surface structure, with desired weight and technical features. The different yarns and warps allow Panther to present fabrics from 3oz to 20oz, which is quite a large spectrum for one mill.
The biggest part of a mill in terms of area are the halls with the weaving machines, the place where you can hear hundreds of machines humming at speed. Here again, the three friends had ambitious plans and created a large park of weaving machines, with a huge number of rapier machines, weaving at the quality speed of 700 to 900RPM.
Once the fabric is woven, it undergoes several finishes, such as sizing and quality controls. With enim fabric - being quite a nasty beast to control due to its humble and rugged origins - ensuring a stable fabric with consistent indigo colour from roll to roll is a key priority.
Today, about 45 million metres of denim fabric leave the Panther Denim mill every year. Its business is divided into the Chinese domestic market, where the mill is working with leading denim brands, and the international market, where big US and European denim brands enjoy the innovation and sustainability credentials of its fabrics.
