Textile Mill 17

A Thousand Years of Weavers

A thousand years ago, in the legend at the heart of the film Wanted, weavers formed a secret society of assassins called the Fraternity. As of recently — in the story — the Fraternity members have been holed up at Textile Mill 17, a working mill whose location only a small number of people know. From its loom hall, the order reads the Loom of Fate, the great loom whose woven fabric is believed to encode the names of those the Fates have marked.

Hold on to that framing, because it is what makes this small section belong, delightfully, inside a fabric directory. The Fraternity is not a society that happens to meet in a mill; in the story it is a society of weavers, whose sacred instrument is a loom and whose scriptures are woven cloth. Textile Mill 17 is their headquarters, workshop and fortress in one, and this hub is the doorway to its people, its machinery and its legend.

The People of the Mill

Three figures organize the pages under this hub. Wesley Gibson is offered the opportunity to seek revenge for the murder of his father, who was a highly skilled assassin, and he is invited by his father's partner, Sloan, to follow in his father's footsteps. Sloan is the Fraternity's leader, the teacher who explains the group to Wesley. Fox is the master assassin Sloan assigns to educate him — sent first to protect him, then to mentor him.

Each of those figures has a page of their own in this section. The assassins overview explains how the Fraternity receives its targets from tiny markings in threads spun on the Loom of Fate. The reality page steps outside the fiction entirely, comparing the film's mill with real textile mills. The video page points to the film itself, where the whole legend is visible on screen.

The Film That Hid the Mill in Plain Sight

Wanted reached screens in 2008, directed by Timur Bekmambetov and based on the comic series by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones. The section's favorite story about it is a playful one: that in the not-so-distant past a high-profile tiff among Fraternity members forced the weavers to spin a tale rather than cloth, gathering to create a film that would turn true-life events into something appearing as fiction, with the mill hidden in plain sight at the center of the movie.

Enjoy that story as it is meant — as fan writing from a textile site thrilled to see its industry on screen. Nothing in this section is a real directory listing: there is no mill to tour, no Fraternity to join, and no loom issuing names. The mill, its people and its Loom of Fate are the film's inventions, labeled as fiction here and celebrated anyway.

How to Explore This Section

Start here, then choose your thread. For the characters, follow the pages on Wesley Gibson, Fox and Sloan. For the machinery of the myth, read the assassins overview. For the facts behind the fantasy, visit the reality page and the video page.

However you arrived — by searching for the film, for a character, or for a mill that shares a name with this fictional one — take the section as it is offered: a small, atmospheric detour inside a large practical library. The weavers of the story read fate in cloth; the weavers of the real industry, catalogued all around this section, make the cloth itself.

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