Greige Fabric

Cloth Before It Becomes Fabric

Every finished fabric in this directory began as greige. Woven greige comes off the loom with the warp size that protected its threads still in the cloth, its natural waxes and pectins intact in cotton, its color the uneven natural grey-beige that gives the goods their name; knitted greige comes off the machine with knitting oils in it instead. Nothing about greige is a defect - it is an intermediate product, the textile industry's flour rather than its bread - and a large, expert trade exists in making it well: even weaving, clean yarn, controlled shrinkage potential and honest weight, because every later process, from desizing and scouring to dyeing and printing, magnifies whatever the loom put in. Mills that sell greige are selling that consistency to finishers, converters and garment makers who run their own wet processing.

The routes out of greige explain the rest of this section. Preparation scours and bleaches the cloth to a uniform white ground; dyeing colors piece goods evenly or, in yarn-dyed work, never sees greige at all; printing needs a prepared surface; and the finishes catalogued on the Fabric Finishes page turn prepared cloth into the brushed, repellent, wrinkle-free and coated fabrics sold under their own names. Some greige is used almost as-is - canvas, industrial cloths, embroidery grounds and the tougher cheesecloths - and print-on-demand and digital textile printing have added a modern buyer: the printer who purchases prepared-for-print greige by the roll and finishes only the surface chemistry themselves.

Specifying and Buying Greige Goods

A greige specification is a weaver's document: fiber and yarn count, construction in ends and picks or courses and wales, loom-state width and weight, and the expected finished yield after processing shrinkage, which for cotton can run several percent in each direction. Buyers state the end route - prepared for dye, prepared for print, resin-finished, sanforised - because the right greige for a dark piece-dye is not the right greige for a white optic bleach, and faults are judged against the route: a barré or mixed-yarn fault invisible in greige becomes a dyed stripe that ruins a batch. Inspection is therefore done twice in serious trade, once grey and once finished, and the mills below are listed for exactly this foundation work.

This directory lists nine mills across China, the USA, India, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Honduras and Pakistan, each linked to its profile in the Fabric Mills by Name section, plus one mill listed without a country. The spread of countries is the greige trade in miniature - spinning and weaving sit where fiber, labor and energy costs favour them, while finishing often happens near the garment or print customer. Around this page, the Fabric Mill Directory hub indexes every finished category this unfinished cloth feeds, from Gabardine to Gauze. Thank you for using the Apparel Search Fabric Mill Directory.

Knitted greige has its own vocabulary that buyers should not confuse with the woven one: jersey, interlock and rib greige are specified by machine gauge, loop length and grams per square metre off the machine, and they relax and shrink differently in finishing - a knit can change width dramatically between the machine and the finished roll, which is why knit greige is priced and checked by weight as much as by length. Woven greige, by contrast, is checked by length and construction count. An enquiry that names the construction system - woven or knitted - alongside the fiber and end route saves the first round of clarification with any mill on this page.

Greige Fabric Mills Listed in This Directory