Every fabric on this site carries one name: selvage.lab. It's our own label — a curated collection of denim from the best mills in the world — and it has been for almost 8 years.
Where the fabric comes from
Deadstock and overproduction from mills and fabric traders. We buy at the best mills in the world — mostly Japan and Italy, but occasionally some old US stock too. Deadstock in warehouses, overproduction, cancelled customer orders, and sometimes development rolls: the tests a mill weaves before settling on the final weight, construction or colour.
Old stock from garment factories. Rolls pile up in a factory over the years: cancelled orders, fabric bought for sampling, remainders from finished production runs. Some of the most interesting cloth we handle comes out of these warehouses — those are the real treasure hunts for us.
One way or another, everything on this site has been through our hands.
We don't share mill details
Often we simply can't. Old stock arrives unlabelled — rolls that have sat in a warehouse for years, with whatever paperwork they once had long gone. And some of the Japanese traders we buy from don't disclose their own sources either.
Where we do know, those relationships took twenty-five years to build. They're the business.
About certificates
We're asked about eco certification regularly, so: we don't have any, and we'd rather explain why than imply otherwise.
Our cloth was woven years ago, for someone else. Where the cotton was grown and how it was dyed doesn't come with the roll, and we're not going to invent it. So there is no organic certificate here.
What is factually true of every metre on this site: the cloth already exists. No cotton is grown, no yarn spun, nothing woven or dyed to fill your order.
Deadstock is exactly what the word says — cloth that stopped moving. We give it a second chance.
And one thing from experience rather than paperwork — mills that still run selvedge looms don't cut corners on yarn. It's slow, expensive cloth to make, and it isn't made from poor cotton. That's our judgement after twenty-five years in this trade, not a certificate.
What you will find
Every fabric is weighed and measured here before it goes online. We cut a 100 cm² sample and weigh it to ISO 3801, so the oz figure you read is one we produced — not one copied from a supplier's sheet.
Weight in oz, construction, composition, width, sanforized or not, and a realistic shrinkage expectation by wash temperature. Where we don't know something, we say so.