whole cloth

plural whole cloths

1. countableuncountablebusinessA newly made textile which has not yet been cut.

   Synonyms: broadcloth

2. figurativelyuncountableused attributively or preceded by various prepositionsThe fictitious material from which complete fabrications, lies with no basis in truth, are made.

   Mr. Doe's account of the accident was made from whole cloth.

   1 more example

   All those tales that came clicking over the wireless of the capture of huge stores of grain and oil were fables out of whole cloth.

   1917, Sydney Brooks, “What Great Britain is Doing”, in National Geographic

3. figurativelyuncountableSomething made completely new, with no history, and not based on anything else.

   The plans for the widget were drawn from whole cloth.

   4 more examples

   And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion.

   1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 27, in Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, →OCLC

   Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

   1852, Daniel De Leon, transl., chapter 1, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, translation of original by Karl Marx

   The decisions made by judges, however, and the interpretations that they advance or accept must be plausibly inferable from something in the Charter. It is not for the courts to manufacture a constitutional right out of whole cloth.

   1988, Supreme Court of Canada, R. v. Morgentaler

   Susan Wojcicki became YouTube's leader during the obvious phase. She didn't need to invent YouTube's business plan from whole cloth.

   2022, Mark Bergen, Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination, Penguin, →ISBN

1. idiomaticnot comparableIn full extent, wholesale, entirely, without changes or additions.

   Some are strangely detailed, like the hugely antlered white deer-creature-cum-forest-god seemingly stolen whole cloth from Princess Mononoke.

   2012 May 31, Tasha Robinson, “Film: Review: Snow White And The Huntsman”, in The A.V. Club