A Coat With Character

A valued partner from the earliest days of the company, Magee 1866 is a fifth-generation family-owned mill located in Donegal, Ireland—a town that uncoincidentally shares its name with a specific type of flecked pattern. In true Donegal tweed tradition, Magee’s creations have a hardiness suited to Northwest Ireland’s windswept shores yet feel soft and spongey to the hand, a quality that lends itself to our balmacaan coats. Among the proprietary tweeds it mills for Polo is also a blend of lambswool and alpaca that achieves an unparalleled depth of color and texture, used this fall in a brown herringbone RL67 jacket with a matching vest.

Situated in the Scottish Borders, Lovat’s creations are a reflection of its rural surroundings, expressed in rich, earthy hues that have made Lovat a famous name among tweed connoisseurs. For this season, we mined the mill’s substantial archives, where we found a houndstooth tweed from the 1920s that the mill recolored and revived as a three-piece suit, reinterpreting a piece of Lovat’s history though a distinctly Polo lens.

Founded in 1863 in West Yorkshire—the traditional hub of British textile manufacturing—Mallalieus is among the few independent mills still weaving in England. A specialist in tweeds, it is also notable for being a fully vertical mill, taking raw wool fibers that are then dyed, carded, and spun into yarn on-site before the weaving process has even begun. For this fall, we tapped Mallalieus to create a gun check tweed in a tea-stained shade of brown that has been tailored into a sporting jacket with a matching vest.