I was recently regaling James Eden about my time working at the discount menswear store, Slaters. This was an attempt at building some kind of credo. Eden is the CEO of luxury menswear brand Private White VC, and we were midway through a tour of the mill the company is based out of. It fell a little short of the mark. I used to hawk hirewear dinner suits for just under £60 a pop — he sells jackets that go for £1,500.
As we turned a corner in the mill, a member of Eden’s staff appeared in front of us.
“Um, someone at No.10 has booked in for nine o’clock,” they said, a bit flustered.
“Tomorrow?” Eden asked.
“Yes. I just thought I’d let you know.”
“...okay.” He turned to me and laughed a little. “You can’t write about that. You know nothing. Now, where were we?”
We finished our interview and naturally I sent my colleague Ethan Penny back to the mill the next morning with a camera. Eden - decked out in his own wares, hair a shock of black around his head - paced to and fro in the thin rain. Men in blue suits were arrayed about the place, buttoning and unbuttoning their jackets. After a while, a Range Rover turned into the car park and out swaggered Andy Burnham. He and Eden shook hands and disappeared into the mill. It transpires later, when Eden and his team are more amenable to talking about it, that the prime minister got fitted for the suit he wore while giving his Labour conference speech a few weeks later, as well as a peacoat for his late father’s funeral and a chesterfield coat for remembrance Sunday.
Burnham’s penchant for Private White VC has already made multiple headlines — making most of what he called his “Manchester clothes” that defined his mayoral image. Their jackets, shirts, trousers are all understated meditations on traditional menswear and military garments, conveying a kind of everyman charm. At a glance, their harrington jacket could be from Next, or any high street retailer — but they start at about £600. The one Burnham wears was the centre of a story by the Mail trying to skewer his man-of-the-people image. Counter-arguments ensued, and Eden gave an interview to the Guardian criticising the coverage. GQ said leaders ought to take pride in what they wear, and suggested Burnham’s pieces from Private White will likely outlast his government.
He’s also not the only world leader tapping the brand. Founded in 2010, Private White has dressed Boris Johnson, the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Pierce Brosnan, David Beckham and the King of Spain. “Ethan Hawke, Russel Crowe, Eric Clapton, Cilian Murphy, those guys from The Hobbit whose names fail me. I don’t know who they are,” Eden adds. The company made most of the dress shirts worn by the US delegation that accompanied Trump to dinner at Buckingham Palace in 2019.
It’s named after Eden’s great grandfather Jack White. While a private in WW1, White dragged a pontoon of wounded men across the Diyala River in Iraq using a roll of copper wire, and was awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry. The brand trades on its unwavering commitment to making everything in the UK, using materials sourced only from the UK. Curiously, this quintessential blighty vibe (it’s currently hosting a customer raffle to win a ride in a spitfire) does a lot better abroad than it does here. “More people know about us in Munich and Manhattan than they do in Manchester,” Eden says, with some disappointment.
I imagine one of Private White’s international customers reading its labels in some luxury department store and imagining the jackets being made in the stereotypical, green pleasant land of the home counties. In reality, the clothes are made in an old mill on a graffiti-covered backstreet in Salford called Cottenham Lane.
Inside, rolls of fabric sit on top of one another in piles of rough-edged swirls. The marketing and design teams huddle around desks. Racks of jackets, jeans and other pieces are being wheeled back in having been presented at Goodwood Festival – an annual motorsport convention in West Sussex.
Up on the top floor is a sweltering cutting room where the garments are all made by hand with great, Victorian-looking shears. Colourful reels of jacket linings pop in rich mustard-gold. Then the cuttings are taken to the floor below and the cuttings sewn into wearable items under hard strips of fluorescent light.
There is also a menswear archive that feels like a costume department covering the last century. There’s Belstaff trench coats from the ‘30s, one of the raincoats worn by England’s 1966 World Cup squad, gas suits from the gulf war and ‘90s Burberry jackets that would be perfect for anyone wanting to be Liam Gallagher for Halloween. Eden floats among the rails with reverence, and I think of the damage I could do with a few unsupervised hours and a Vinted account.
Coming out of the archive I see an older man doing the rounds, poking his head in the offices full of young social media managers, marketers and so on. This is Mike Stoll. Nearly four decades before Private White VC was set up and built into a niche luxury brand for various movie stars and heads of state, Stoll walked into Cottenham house as an apprentice.
Stoll was born in Clifton, Salford. The grandson of a Jewish emigre who fled Russian pogroms in 1905, he landed in Liverpool thinking it was New York, was taken in by a family in Manchester and became a schmearer — someone that glues coats together by pressing them with the edges of their thumb. He started as an apprentice at the mill in 1972. Back then, it was making around 2,000 Macintosh coats a week for the “Big 5” tailors: Jackson the Tailor, Burtons, Hepworth’s (now Next), Willoughby’s and John Collier. After a few years, he took over the mill in a management buyout, running it himself for some 30 years.
Stoll, 69, has stooped shoulders, a rasping whistle of a voice and a very good memory for when the pound was or wasn’t strong. He is a man who, in many ways, came into an industry at the wrong time. Despite his standing, he never experienced the archetypal, perhaps slightly Dickensian, life of a textiles magnate. “The people before me all had Rolls Royces, they were the telephone billionaires of their era,” he tells me, in his office — the former cutting room back when he first took over. “Exporting, making a fortune, cheap labour, strong pound. It was just a different game. Then the pound went weak in the ‘60s, of course, then they really exported and cleaned up. It was good!”
Within a few years of Stoll taking over the mill as he recalls, Thatcher came into power, followed by a recession. Many brands who previously had their clothes made in UK mills took production offshore. For a time Stoll’s mill, which now makes trench coats that retail for £1,600, was making £9 raincoats that sold on the high street for £19.99. “We were making the cheapest rain coats in the world. Ten years later they were bringing coats in from Indonesia at nine pound and selling them for £130!”
Stoll spent his life trying to do the “Made in England” thing that now sets Private White VC apart, but it didn't quite go his way. “You’ve got to be a bit thick to do what I’ve done, really. But I got stuck in and it just became my life,” he says. He got by on contracts making clothes for the police or cabin crews. Meanwhile, hundreds of factories and mills closed down. “I’ve watched people broken down with all their sorrows and woes when they’ve lost 5,000 staff,” he says. “You have to remember I was brought up in the trade.”
But all those mills closing down meant that, when it became du jour again to make in England, brands like Paul Smith, Aquascutum, Barbour and Burberry turned to Stoll, the last man standing. He had a boom. By the late 2010s he owned seven factories and a handful of brands, and was ready to sell them all off and retire. Then Eden showed up with the idea for Private White VC.
Eden had known Stoll – who is a close friend of his father’s – his entire life. He was not, like Stoll, brought up in the trade. He is from a line of GPs and solicitors, and trained in economics and became an investment banker. He took redundancy after the credit crunch and threw his lot in with Stoll, who was convinced by Eden and his father that he’d have an easier time selling the business and mill if it came with a big brand name attached.
Nigh on 20 years later, Private White remains a brand better-known amongst menswear connoisseurs, and well-off ones at that. But Stoll and Eden don’t seem to mind. The former now has greater ambitions. He’s in talks with Salford Council to redevelop the area around the factory into what he has deemed “the fabric quarter”, where the factory would be rolled in with a retail district and academy teaching young people how to work in the trade. Stoll tells me Burnham liked the idea when he was mayor, and he has the backing of a big housing firm to build around the area too.
He envisions something similar to Solomeo, the hamlet in Umbria, Italy, where the staff of cashmere giant Bruno Cucinelli all live and work together. To Stoll, he is sat on the answers to the UK’s social ills: a factory providing jobs, an academy getting people into said jobs, and houses for the workers to buy and live in. But things are moving too slow for Stoll. “Everything they say they want, I have given them! And they’re still wondering whether it’s a good idea.”
And best of all, it would return Stoll to a time he so narrowly missed. Manchester’s last mill owner could finally become something like his forebears, with his workers training and living in Manchester, producing in England, and to the world.
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