The singer paid tribute to her home city wearing an LA Dodgers baseball cap crafted by English woollen mill Moon. When Billie Eilish took to the stage at the 67th Grammy awards wearing a hat with the branding of the baseball team the Los Angeles Dodgers, few would have noticed the much smaller logo on the side with two tiny union flags and the word “Moon”. But in a small town in West Yorkshire, Moon is a household name, as one of the last surviving woollen mills in the UK.

The company prefers to say “we’re one of a select few now”, said Joe McCann, brand and product director at Moon, aiming to paint a less negative picture of what many people would think of as a dying trade. It is true that “surviving” might be a misnomer, given the company is thriving, shipping across the world to high-end clothing and interiors brands, including Ralph Lauren and the sports brand New Era, which collaborated with the 188-year-old textile company on Eilish’s hat.

McCann said the team were “delighted” to discover early on Monday morning that Moon had been beamed across the world during the 23-year-old singer’s performance of her song Birds of a Feather. “We didn’t get any heads up but of course we spotted it immediately and were like ‘wow that’s incredible,” he said. Though Eilish failed to scoop a single gong during the music industry’s top awards, the star sang live with a backdrop that paid tribute to her home city, Los Angeles, which was besieged by wildfires in January, killing 29 people, damaging or destroying more than 18,000 homes and forcing 200,000 people to evacuate.

The performance, described as “one of her most moving” by critics, will make a great picture to add to the wall of celebrities at Moon’s HQ, McCann said, which includes photographs of stars such as Liam Gallagher and Justin Bieber wearing clothing made from Moon fabric. The wall also features images of Downing Street and the EU Summit in 2018, where leaders are sitting on chairs made with fabric from the mill, as well as a picture of King Charles on a 2015 visit to the stone factory building built nearly 200 years ago where Moon still lives – though now with a number of modern extensions that have allowed it to keep up with growing demand.

“We do everything from start to finish here in Guiseley,” he said, referring to Moon’s home, a small town that was once in the heart of the woollen industry, near Leeds and Bradford, just outside the Yorkshire Dales. Unlike some textile and clothing companies where some products are made in-house and others made overseas where production costs are lower, everything is produced in a labour-intensive process in Yorkshire, using wool from the UK, New Zealand and South Africa.

Though the mill is a lot more high-tech than it was in the Victorian era, when it was started by entrepreneur Abraham Moon, it does broadly the same thing – raw undyed wool goes in one end and luxury fabric comes out of the other. “We produce the yarn, we weave, and then we also finish, all on one site, which is very unique,” said McCann. So Eilish’s hat was made in this little Yorkshire town? “Yes, every component of that fabric would have been made here.”.