Single-origin suits traceable to the sheep’s back that provided the wool

Menswear company MJ Bale has introduced an Australian first, suits created solely from wool grown on one property.

Chris Poole, left, wears a single-origin wool suit designed by MJ Bale. The firm’s founder Matt Jensen, right, says the line is ‘the ultimate in traceability’. Picture: John Feder

You’ve heard of single-origin coffee­. Now meet the single-origin­ suit.

Menswear company MJ Bale has introduced an Australian first this week in the Kingston Collection, a range of suits created solely from wool grown on one property, Tasmanian farm Kingston.

Matt Jensen, the founder of MJ Bale, said the initiative came about after a meeting with Kingston owner Simon Cameron four years ago at a dinner put on by an Italian weaving company they both work with. “We spoke about this idea and the merits of it for everybody,” Jensen told The Australian. “I explained to him how passionate I am about Australian wool and the vertical integration of Australian fibres through to the consumer.”

Jensen said that given the complexity­ of the supply chain in fashion — especially from raw wool through to the Italian mills — it was an extremely time-consuming process.

The wool from Kingston’s flock of merinos has a particularly high crimp that Jensen says brings an airiness to the yarn and fabric that “exemplifies the properties of wool, such as fantastic drape and elasticity”. Such a project has plenty of parallels with the food industry, according to Jensen and Cameron, who is president of the Australian Superfine Woolgrowers Association.

“There are consumers out there concerned with proven­ance, whether it’s beef or cheese. They know where it came from, where the raw materials came from,” said Cameron.

“A line like this is the ultimate in traceability. People can come to the farm and meet the sheep that provided the wool.”

As part of the agreement, MJ Bale paid an additional contrib­ution — more than 50 per cent of the wool price again — for Cameron to invest in his property and sustainable farming practices and preserve the native grasslands ­environment unique to Kingston.

Jensen first trialled the concept on a smaller project — but one big in marketing savvy — outfitting the Australian cricket team in 2013 in formal wool uniforms created from sheep that had grazed on grass transplanted from the Sydney Cricket Ground.

“We’ve been the country that has lots of raw materials but we ship them out somewhere else around the world and let others create the end product,” says Jensen.

“Here’s an example (with the Kingston Collection) of an Australian business working at grassroots level, then taking it through to creation of product, value-adding along the way.”

While Cameron concedes that he doesn’t have too many occas­ions for a suit, he does have one from the Kingston Collection, saying: “There’s something very meaningful about it.”