Who Makes Our Fabric

MATERIALS

Six mills you can stand in, and the one question we cannot close yet.

A thread that ends up in a TRUE TRIBE swim short starts in a valley.

In Chagnac, in the south of the Ardèche, Payen wraps nylon around a core of Lycra. The core stretches, the cover spins on, the yarn comes off the spindle able to snap back. Pierre Payen worked that out with DuPont in 1965 and called it Pagastic. The house has been in the Ardèche since 1839, throwing silk before it ever touched nylon. Synthetics came in the 1950s. The hand stayed.

Weaving came in 1990, finishing in 2000. Today the yarn is covered in Chagnac, then woven, dyed and finished a few kilometres away in Les Vans. From yarn to finished cloth, every step is theirs, with no subcontractor in between. Their stretch wovens are OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified.

Payen makes NOIRAIR, our stretch shell, and AQUALITE, the breathable weave that runs as both shell and lining.

ACROSS THE ALPS

East of the Alps another yarn meets a loom in Cadorago, a town in the old silk country south of Lake Como. Como has woven silk for Europe since the sixteenth century. Gruppocinque weaves here. Lorella Paulotto, a co-founder, has run it since 2014 and turned it toward research and lower-impact production. Shuttle woven and jacquard, on the mill's own looms.

They weave NOIRLITE and HEAVYPROTECT for active, and most of our swim shells.

Gipitex weaves in the next towns over, and has since the late 1980s. Jacquard and dobby, with an archive of old designs the design floor still works from. The looms run on renewable electricity. Gipitex makes SPACE SOLID, the matte.

Farther east, Jersey Lomellina knits in Carvico, near the Adda river between Milan and Bergamo. Circular knits since 1977. Just over ninety people. They make RENEW SOFT, the regenerated nylon stretch our lightest active layers start from.

THE DOURO

Victor Têxteis knits in Vila Nova de Gaia, on the south bank of the Douro, across the water from Porto. More than thirty years of technical knits for swim and sport. OEKO-TEX Standard 100.

They make AQUA AIR, the lining on our wholesale orders. A warp knit at seventy grams, the part of a swim short nobody photographs and everybody notices.

LAKE BIWA

The sixth mill is the one name here you may already know. Toray began in 1926 as Toyo Rayon, eastern rayon, and rayon was sold to the world as artificial silk. Its first thread was spun on the shore of Lake Biwa. It made its own nylon 6 in 1941 and licensed nylon technology from DuPont a decade later, fourteen years before DuPont sat down with Pierre Payen.

Toray makes every AquaSilk. It is the reason a swim short can drape like something far less technical and still come back from chlorine.

Toray runs plants in Japan and in China. Ours comes from China: every AquaSilk we cut is woven there. Five mills we can name to the building. One we can name to the country.

Three of these places learned on silk first. An Ardèche valley, the towns around Como, a lake shore in Japan. Each spent a long time finding out how a filament behaves under tension, in dye, against light.

THE INDUS VALLEY

The rolls go south and east, to the Indus Valley, where the river meets the Arabian Sea. Zero Waste Studio is ours. Cutting, stitching, quality control and packing happen in one building, by people on our own payroll, under a studio manager we speak to every day.

Danish, the cutting master, unrolls a bolt of black shell along the table, weights the pattern, and chalks the line. Its yarn was wound in the Ardèche or its cloth woven under Como. The last hands it meets before yours are here. Proudly not made in France.

WHAT WE CANNOT SAY YET

For decades, most water-repellent finishing in technical apparel ran on fluorine chemistry, the family called PFAS. Many of these compounds barely break down. Some build up in people, and the best studied have been linked to cancers of the kidney and testes.

France banned PFAS in consumer clothing on January 1, 2026. California got there a year earlier. In Europe, a ban on the whole family cleared its first scientific committee in March 2026.

We know the mill and the name for every fabric on this list, and the town for all but one. Payen has answered us in writing: no PFAS added at any stage, and the water-repellent finish on our AquaLite is fluorine-free. From the other five mills, we do not yet hold a written line about what went onto the cloth after it left the loom. We are collecting declarations from each of them, and test data where it exists. Until that is complete, we will not call a fabric of ours PFAS-free.