Jersey – the history
At the end of 1800, “jersey” was a knitted fabric, very heavy, used by the fishermen from the british Island of Jersey, from which comes its name.
Later, it trasformed into plain knitted fabric, simple, unribbed, light, soft and with natural elasticity. Due to these qualities Jersey became widely used in many different fields of clothing. Because of its simplicity and lightness is ideal to tailor garments. It was thanks to Coco Chanel , who used the fabric for her designs, consequently Jersey became fashionable
(Coco Chanel)
Jersey – the Knitting
This fabric is produced with circular machines for a single knit, these machines work with cyclindrical vertical needles. Each feed point creates a bit of fabric, to give an idea of its structure, we can consider Jersey as a spiral fabric. Therefore, Jersey is a very compact fabric, smooth on the outside whilst the inside is slightly rough.
The charateristics of jersey
Jersey, is stable in length and elastic in width and can be produced with every knitting thread: the most used are: cotton, wool and viscose; due to its spiral structure,it has a natural tendency to twist especially if you use low quality cotton thread, this is because the thread twist combines with the twist of the production.
Solutions
Understanding this problem, Visconti di Angera, uses only double twisted cotton threads; our thread is made by two single threads with opposite twists, one twists left in contrast the other twists right. The outcome is that the thread has almost no twist and the mercerising process, adds more stability; even more to reduce the twist in the fabric, we use a circular machine with 30 feeding points, it is a slower production but the result is a very stable fabric compared to the modern 90 feeding points machines. Furthermore with the aim to produce a stable fabric, we ri-mercerise the fabric itself; finally the fabric is left to rest for several weeks before it is used.
Production
As a result we produce very fresh and light garments with maximum dimentional stability.