Behind the scenes of an ancient French fabric house

In 2013, Pierre Frey acquired the French fabric house Le Manach, ensuring the preservation of thousands of rare and beautiful designs, and protecting the unrivalled skills of its expert team

The traditional and modern of Le Manach are at their most evident on the looms of Pierre Frey's mill in northern France. Very little is done manually any more; instead, a percussive cacophony of noise is hammered out by an army of machines, each with its own specific job. One rapidly spins thread onto a row of wobbling bobbins, another draws great long lengths from different coloured spools of cotton to build the warp (vertical threads) of a design. The electric looms that weave the Toiles de Tours are highly efficient and allow clients to order as little as one metre in their chosen design and colourway.

The mill has been in the same small village since Pierre Frey started his company in 1935. Some of the more archaic tools have been relegated to a small museum, which is housed in a side room of the factory. It is filled with dusty old logbooks, wooden hand blocks for printing and an ancient looking loom that has not seen any action for a while.

Just outside the doors, between the museum and the main factory floor, is what looks like an identical machine to the loom, except that this one is manned. Olivier Joannen was the only man at the old Le Manach mill in Tours who knew how to operate this nineteenth-century jacquard loom, so when the company was bought, he agreed to move here with his wife and four children.

He weaves just one metre of silk velvet a day. Rather like a precious grand piano that falls out of tune in a slight draught, the jacquard loom is a sensitive creature. When it arrived at the Pierre Frey mill from Tours, it took Olivier seven months to rebuild it. Its appearance may be rustic, but 'Tigre', the beautiful and unique silk velvet Olivier is weaving, is anything but. To produce a 15-metre length, over 900 silk bobbins must be hand-wound. Each one holds eight threads, which are hundreds of metres long. Six colours of silk are combined among the bobbins to produce 36 shades. As Olivier weaves, he feels for the slightest change in tension, which indicates that one of the 900 bobbins needs changing. When it is time for a new design, in huge contrast to the industrious machines next door, it takes Olivier a week to prepare the loom. He is worth his weight in gold - perhaps it's time he got an apprentice.