I came across this on the popular French men’s fashion blog Dandies…

Translation: driving gloves will allow you to firmly grip the steering wheel without fear of slipping because of sweat!

 

As featured on Mr Porter last week.

And we’d like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Healthy and Prosperous New Year!

Dents handsewn deerskin driving gloves, selected as one of the Wall Street Journal‘s top 50 Holiday Gifts.

 

Handsewn cashmere lined gloves in hairsheep leather

By John Roberts

1. Our leather buyer has almost 50 years experience in selecting only the softest and finest quality leathers for Dents hand made gloves.

2.  For over 230 years Dents has been designing and manufacturing leather gloves in England, for the world’s finest shops and department stores. The first pair was cut by Master Cutter, John Dent,  in the year 1777, in the city of Worcester. For the past 50 years, Dents gloves have been crafted in the old market town of Warminster, in the quintessential English county of Wiltshire.

3. Today, as in the past, Dents gloves are made using traditional methods handed down over the centuries. Little has changed from 1777 in the way we make gloves, apart from the introduction of electricity.

4.  Each pair is still bench cut, one at a time, relying on the skill and experience of the master cutter to shape the well fitting glove.

5.  Dents gloves are made with a completely separate glove lining to the outer leather shell, and the lining is then fitted into the glove, ensuring a much better fitting glove – this method of manufacture is called “glove in glove”, and is an added cost, but an essential part of the traditional glove maker’s craft.

6. There are 42  components to cut, assemble and sew together, to create one pair of Dents gloves.

7. In the manufacture of one pair of gloves, there are 32 separate operations to be performed by highly skilled craft people.

8. It takes time to make fine leather gloves – approximately 7 hours to cut and sew just one pair.

9. It takes up to six years to fully train a glove cutter, and four years to fully train a skilled glove sewer.

10. Today, when we use machinery, we use the same type of Singer sewing machines we have been using for over a hundred years, except that now they are driven by electricity, rather than by a foot pedal. The machines we use are no longer manufactured, and the skill of our mechanics is constantly tested in repairing and lengthening their useful life.

Dents driving gloves circa 1907

Dents women's driving gloves circa 1910

 

Driving gloves have been tremendously popular this year, as we’ve mentioned before. Styles have changed somewhat from the first ones we made, as these pictures from our Glove Museum will attest – in those days, you needed a lot of protection from the elements!

This year we have a special promotion on driving gloves for men, and driving gloves for women too. They’re perfect for the chauffeur or chauffeuse in your life - why not take a look in our online shop?

These gloves are made right here in our factory in Warminster, England, but what makes them so special?

• They’re individually hand cut and hand sewn, one pair at a time, as one would a bespoke Savile Row suit. It takes a minimum of three feet of leather to make one pair of gloves.
• There are at least 48 different components in one pair of gloves. It takes a quick eye, dexterity and much skill to sew this many small pieces of leather together. There are 32 different manufacturing operations involved, and the whole process takes between four to eight hours depending on the design and leather chosen.
• In our most expensive gloves, you will find “quirks”, small diamond shaped pieces of leather sewn into the base of the fingers to give an unrivalled feeling of comfort, and new meaning to the phrase “they fit like a glove”.
• They are bench cut, which means they are hand cut by a Master Glove Cutter, from a glove pattern, one pair at a time. Because they are made this way, using traditional skills, no two pairs of gloves can be exactly the same. The final shape and fit depends on many things, above all the experience, skill and hand stretching of the leather by the Cutter. The skilled stretching of the leather around the pattern ensures a good fitting glove.
• We make each glove lining as a separate glove to the outer leather glove shell. The result is a much better fitting glove. This is a more expensive way of manufacturing, but the difference is clear when you wear the gloves.

Take a look at a couple of reviews of Dents gloves appearing on major blogs in the UKand US – both blogs are extremely popular, very different, and well worth checking in with regularly.

Dents have been making leather gloves since 1777, and in that time we’ve learned a thing or two about making them fit.

Our peccary gloves are made by hand in our Warminster factory here in England. Each one is individually hand cut and hand stitched. Due to the special nature of the leather we only make two pairs a day, and making just one pair involves 32 different operations, taking a total of around 6 hours. These particular gloves are normally lined with Scottish cashmere which has been specially knitted for us. In fact, they are made as two separate gloves: a lining, and an outer glove. We then fit the lining into the outer glove to create an exceptional fit.

Many styles of Dents gloves contain components and examples of the glovemaker’s craft not often found today – for example quirks, which are small diamond shaped pieces of leather sewn at the base of the fingers, where they are attached to the hand of the glove to improve the fit, or hand felling which involves stitching the hem of glove to the lining as well as the back of glove, helping the glove keep its shape.

Dennis, our head leather cutter, has his own explanation for the fit. “It’s because of the ‘hidden fit’ – the amount of “stretch” the cutter puts into the leather before cutting. It allows the glove leather to stretch on your hand, but then due to this pre-stretching it retracts again keeping its shape and fit. It’s a skill that comes from years of experience. “

Whatever the reason for the fit, it’s part of a commitment to quality which runs through the whole of our Collection…

New York is one of my three favourite cities, and I’ve just come home after spending almost a whole week there. Corgi, Dents’s sister company, was showing off its range of cashmere knitwear and socks at the Coterie fashion show. This was a Spring merchandise show, so a little more subdued for us than the Fall show; still, we got some new accounts and some nice reorders despite the difficult economy.

New York last week was a madhouse. As well as the normal trade shows and market week, they had street markets, the United Nations, President Obama giving interviews on all the talk shows, and on a warm Monday evening the Opening Night Gala of the New York Metropolitan Opera broadcast live on huge video screens all over Times Square (Tosca). Whole blocks of the city were closed to traffic for extended periods, and when the President was near, the streets were packed with police and Secret Service. The city was a heaving mass of people, (according to New Yorkers, they’re not spending any money though!) and the weather was beautiful all week.

New Yorkers and Americans everywhere are currently obsessing over Obama and health care reform. In New York, the older people regret they voted for Obama, and the younger people are happy they did. The younger people are still waiting for “change”, while older people have decided they don’t want “change” after all. When they talk about health care they all have horror stories about the “socialized” medicine in other western countries, and they’re sure their system is best; meanwhile they forget that thousands of Americans die every year because they don’t have any health care at all, and only America, out of all western countries, is (still) working on a radical reform of its healthcare system.

Meanwhile life goes on, and here’s a bit of mystery for you: Saks Fifth Avenue, who feature our women’s fine leather gloves in their stores and catalogue, have already sold half the stock allocated to their website of our top selling style, and have reordered – who is buying all these gloves when we’re still in September? Maybe they know something we don’t?

Alan