The natural color of cotton.
Eight O Seven (807)
The law that allows fabrics to be cut in the United States, garments to be assembled in Mexico, Caribbean and Central American countries, returned to the United States with tariff assessed only on the added value (sewing).
Enzymes
Are proteins and as such are present in all living cells. Enzymes speed up chemical processes that would run very slowly if at all. They are non-toxic and readily broken down. Enzymes are used in textile processing, mainly in the finishing of fabrics and garments.
Enzyme Washing
Use of cellulose enzymes to soften the jeans and lighten color.
Express
Popularizer of European-cut jeans, innovative fabric blends in denim.
Fair to Middling
The name for the grade of cotton usually used in the spinning of yarns that will be used for the production of denim fabric.
The smallest textile component. A near microscopic, hairlike substance that may be natural or manmade. Are units of matter having length at least 100 times their diameter or width. Fibres suitable for textile use possess adequate length, fineness, strength, and flexibility for yarn formation and fabric construction, and for withstanding the intended use of the completed fabric. Other properties affecting textile fibre performance include elasticity, crimp (waviness), moisture absorption, reaction to heat and sunlight, reaction to the various chemicals applied during processing and in the dry cleaning or laundering of the completed fabric, and resistance to insects and micro-organisms. The wide variation of such properties among textile fibres determines their suitability for various uses.
Filling (also called weft)
The lengthwise, selvage to selvage horizontal, yarns carried over and under the warp. Filling yarns generally have less twist than warp yarns because they are subjected to less strain in the weaving process and therefore require less strength.
In pile-fabric constructions, such as velvet or velveteen, extra sets of warps are used to form the pile. A single filling yarn is known as a pick.
Five Pocket Jean
Means your jean has 2 back pockets plus 2 front pockets and a coin pocket inside the front right pocket.
Flannel
Any napped fabric be it, twill, plain weave, printed, yarn dyed or solid color.
Flax
A natural vegetable fibre composed mainly of cellulose that is processed from the stems of the flax plant. The flax plant yields long fine fibres that can be from 2″-36″ in length while the color can range from light ivory to dark tan or grey.
Fox Fibre
Naturally Coloured Cotton, the fibres of which grow from seeds that already have their color and do not need to be dyed. It is believed that six colors (pink, red, lavender, brown, green and yellow) were developed by the ancient peoples of the Americas thousands of years ago. Sally Fox managed to breed plants that bring the fibre quality of the wilder brown cottons up to that required by modern spinning technology. FOXFIBRE colors grow best without chemicals, opening the door to organically grown cotton, the COLORGANIC cotton. Three shades are available today, Coyote Brown, Buffalo Brown and Palo Verde Green.
Gabardine
A distinctive 45 or 63 warp face left hand twill if single plied yarns are used or right hand twill of a two ply yarn is used in the weft. Gabardines are made from any fibre not just cotton.
Sturdy cotton pants worn by Genoese sailors.
Genova
The most important port in Italy; by the Genoa-bay by the north-west-end of Italian peninsula. 714.000 inhabitants. Industry; harbour for ships of all sizes. University build in 1243; commercial upper-secondary school; Academy of Fine Arts. Romanesque-Gothic cathedral (10th – 14th centuries). Aristocracy palaces: Palazzo Reale (1650-1705), Palazzo Rosso (17. Cent.), both with collections of paintings. A 70 meters high lighthouse is the landmark of the town. A sight is the cemetery Camposanto. Genova got under Roman control in 218 BC. As an independent republic in the middle age it was the centre for trade in the Mediterranean; When it progressed its trade to the Orient (the West) it got in dispute with Venezia. Defeats and internal disputes weakened the town, and in the 15th century it lost its importance. In 1828 the town regained its independence thanks to Andrea Doria. In 1768 Genoa sold its last colony, Corsica, to Italy. Bonaparte later incorporated the town into France. In 1815 it got a part of the kingdom Sardinia.
Ginning
The industrial process where seeds are taken out of picked cotton.
Good Middling
The name for the best grade of cotton.
Gray Goods/Loomstate/Greige/Grey
Words used to describe fabric that is just off the loom, woven but unfinished in any way.
Greencast
This is when a yellow-green sulphur is used in the indigo dye.
Hand or Handle
The way a fabric feels. This is a very subjective judgment of the feel of a fabric and it should help decide if a fabric is suitable for a specific end use. Hand may be crisp, soft, drapeable, smooth, springy, stiff, cool, warm, rough, hard, limp, soapy…….. Finishing and garment wash affect the final handle of a fabric.
Harness
The frame holding heddles that have warp yarns threaded through its eyes.
Heather/Cross Dye/Top Dye/Melange
A mixed fabric color is achieved (the best examples are grey t-shirts, socks or wool used in suitings) by using different colors of fibre, and mixing them together. Black and white fibre mixed will combine to give grey heather fibre.
Heddles
Steel wires, or thin flat steel strips held by the frame, with a loop or eye near the centre through which one or more warp yarns pass on the loom so that the thread movement is controllable in weaving. Heddles control the weave pattern and shed as the harnesses are raised and lowered during the weaving.
The controversial fibre with the bad image. Hemp is a low cost annual seed plant that grows in most climates. Hemp’s natural fibre and seed oil have over 25,000 possible industrial applications and these were once competitors of wood pulp, cotton, and petroleum products like inks, paints, plastics, solvents, sealants, and synthetic fabrics. Hemp (official name cannabis sativa, L, from the Greek Kannabis ) fell victim to the anti-drug sentiment of the times when the U.S. Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937. The intent of this law was to prohibit the use of marijuana, but it created so much red tape that the production of industrial hemp became nearly impossible in spite of all the products that derive from hemp. In his October 30, 1988, editorial in California’s most conservative newspaper, The Orange County Register, senior columnist Alan Bock stated that “Since 1937, about half the forests in the world have been cut down to make paper. If hemp had not been outlawed, most would still be standing, oxygenating the planet.”
Herringbone
Herringbone is a weave where twill warp stripes are created by running twills in different directions.
Jeans that starts about 10 centimetres below the navel.
Hoechst Celanese
Calls their company “a science-based, market-driven company, who produce and market chemicals, fibres and films, engineering plastics, high-performance and specialty materials, pharmaceuticals, and animal-health and crop-protection products”. They are the largest subsidiary of the Hoechst Group, a premier worldwide organisation with 280 companies in 120 countries and an annual sales volume of $28 billion.
Indigo is a blue vat dyestuff, that was originally taken from the “Indigofera tinctoria” plant by fermenting the leaves of the shrub. In 1897, fourteen years after Adolf von Bayer identified the chemical structure of indigo, the chemical became synthetically manufactured. Indigo’s inherent features are good colourfastness to water and light, a continually fading and its inability to penetrate fibres completely. This allows the blue color in jeans made from indigo to always look irregular and individual.
What is indigo?
Indigo is a dyestuff that was originally extracted from a plant. Egyptian excavations have suggested that indigo was used as far back as 1600 B.C.
Natural indigo dyes were used throughout history, and have been found in Africa, India, Indonesia, and China.
Until Adolf von Baeyer identified the chemical structure of indigo in 1883, the only indigo dyes used came from plants. Fourteen years after Baeyer’s discovery, indigo was developed synthetically.
Whether chemical or synthetic, indigo dyes never fully penetrate fibre and the dye continually fades. If any indigo yarn is untwisted, white fibre is found. Other dyes fully penetrate fibres.
Indigo is always blue although there are various casts of blue indigo available. Dyestuff manufacturers have tried to make other colors that duplicate indigo’s special features but no other color fades or avoids full fibre penetration.
Intimate blend yarn
Different fibres are blended together to make a yarn composed of two fibres. The purpose is to mix the properties and characteristics of individual fibres into one new mixed fibre.
Jean
Comes from the French word “Genes” used to describe the pants sailors from Genoa once wore.
While the historical definition implied that all jeans were made of denim, jeans today usually refer to a garment that has 5 pockets (two in the front, two in the back and a small change pocket on the front right pocket) and this style can be made using any kinds of fabrics be it corduroy, twills, or bull denim.
Jeans
Long, narrow pants, especially for women; manufactured by diagonal-weave cotton fabric. Named after where the texture originally were manufactured, the town Genova. The French name is Genes, in English it’s pronounced [dji.ns].
Khaki uniforms were introduced by Sir Harry Burnett Lumsden for British colonial troops in India and were later widely used at the time of the Indian Mutiny (1857-5 and became the official colour for uniforms of British armies, native and colonial, in India.
Today, the word is used both as a color and as a style of trouser. Khaki is a beige to yellow military color and the garment is usually a men’s army style trouser made of a twill cotton fabric.
Laundry
A manufacturing company that takes unwashed jeans, and processes them. This processing includes washing, stone washing, sandblasting, and garment dyeing. Laundries today are critical in making jeans look commercial and wash development has become equally important to fabric development in the jeanswear industry.
The best laundries and wash developments come from Italy, Japan and the United States.
Left Hand Twill
A fabric weave where the twill line runs from the top left hand corner of the fabric towards the bottom right. Usually in piece dyed fabrics, left hand twill fabrics are woven from single plied yarns in the warp. In the jeans industry Lee has always used Left Hand twill denims as their basic denim.
LHT
The LHT, left hand twill, weave runs diagonally from right to left in a northwesterly direction. These denims are softer, fluffier fabrics
Linen
A fibre taken from straw of the flax plant. The stems are steeped in water to remove resinous matter and allow fermentation to take place. After fermentation is completed, the fibrous material is separated from the woody matter and spun into thread. The fibre can be from 2″-36″ long with a natural color that varies from light ivory to dark tan or grey. Linen is very absorbent, take dyes more readily than cotton but has poor resiliency.
The weaving machine. Most famous loom manufacturers are Sulzer Ruti from Switzerland, Picanol from Belgium, Dornier from France, Tsudakoma /Toyoda from Japan and Vamatex from Italy.
The word loom (from Middle English lome, “tool”) is applied to any set of devices permitting a warp to be tensioned and a shed to be formed.
The warp shed is formed with the aid of heddles where one heddle is provided for each end of warp thread. By pulling one end of the heddle or the other, the warp end can be deflected to one side or the other of the main sheet of ends. The frame holding the heddles is called a harness.
Today there are three kinds of looms: dummy shuttle, rapier, and fluid jet.
The dummy-shuttle type, the most successful of the shuttleless looms, makes use of a dummy shuttle, a projectile that contains no weft but that passes through the shed in the manner of a shuttle and leaves a trail of yarn behind it.
The rapier type conveys a pick of weft from a stationary package through the shed by means of either a single rapier or a pair of rapiers. Rapiers are either rigid rods or flexible steel tapes, which are straight when in the shed but on withdrawal are wound onto a wheel, in order to save floor space. Rapier looms are, on the whole, simpler and more versatile than dummy-shuttle looms but are slower in weaving speed.
There are of two kinds of fluid-jet looms, one employing a jet of air, the other a water jet, to propel a measured length of weft through the shed. The significance of this is that nothing solid is passed into the shed other than the weft, which eliminates the difficulties normally associated with checking and warp protection, and reduces the noise to an acceptable level. The machines can attain great weaving speed and output.
Loop Dyed
One of the three major industrial methods of dyeing indigo yarns.
Lycra
Dupont’s trademark for spandex fibre.
Lyocell
The generic name given to the cellulosic fibre developed by Courtaulds and marketed by them under the Tencel brand name.
