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So I'm painting 'pure white' cloth for the first time in a good while and I'd really like to improve it, getting the white solid wasn't too bad it's just that now I've got a solid white I don't know how I should go about adding depth.

I was thinking maybe a really thin blue wash then bring the white back up with thin layers but I'd love some advice or ideas from someone who's done it before.

Generally when painting a "Pure" white on minis it actually isn't White.

Prime it in light grey and gradually layer up to a NEAR white (Super light grey) and leave some of the slightly darker grey in the shadow.
Then you use pure white a the final highlights.

This ends up looking like a white colour when it really is an ultra light grey

Like the Chief said, white will be your high light color. For your shading colors, determine what type of white color you want. For a warmer white, use browns, for a cooler white, blue or blue greys, and for a more neutral white, grey. Since you said "pure white", I would go with grey.

I was to do pure white, I would use a pure white and shade it by airbrushing some very light coats of about 8 other colours.

Thanks chaps, looks like I'll be going back over the whites with grey now and then bringing them back up, at least it should go on clean now as it's back to a white 'basecoat'. Any idea on how dark the light grey should be?

It depends on how deep the folds are. For very deep folds, you can go almost black. For shallow folds, or folds that are barely there, obviously lighter. Most cloth is going to have folds that run from deep to very shallow, so you'll be using rather a few shades of grey. Your last shade before highlighting will be very close to white.