Velvet is woven as a double face cloth: it comes through the loom with a flat plain weave on both sides, concealing a bed of perpendicular yarns joining the two faces. Before coming off the loom, however, the fabric is pulled across a razor-sharp splitting blade, which cuts the joining yarns half way between the faces, creating two pieces of fabric with a flat face on one side and a cut pile face on the other. After washing, pressing, and finishing, this becomes cut velvet.

This fabric is woven in England and made up loomstate, before any of the finishing processes are carried out. The garments are then washed or dyed, shrinking the fabric to size and giving them a particularly rich colour and texture as the garments form with the shrinking fabric and trap the dye into seams and folds in the cloth.