The History of Corduroy

What is corduroy?

Corduroy is a woven fabric with raised ribs running along its surface. Those ribs are called wales. The soft part is a pile: lots of short yarn ends standing above a woven base.

It belongs to the cut-pile family, alongside fabrics such as velveteen. With corduroy, the pile is arranged in separate rows. The little valleys between them give the cloth its striped texture.

The ribs are not sewn on afterwards. During weaving, extra crosswise yarn passes over several lengthwise threads, leaving longer stretches called floats. These are cut open after weaving. The cut ends form the pile. Cotton Incorporated’s textile guide explains the same basic construction.

The crosses in the upper drawing show where the yarn is cut. The lower drawing shows the opened ends fanning out above the base. There is quite a lot going on inside something that mostly makes you want to run a hand down your sleeve.

What does 11-wale corduroy mean?

The number tells you how many ribs there are across an inch. 11-wale corduroy has eleven ribs per inch. Higher counts have more, narrower ribs. Lower counts have fewer, broader ones.

CottonWorks puts fine-wale corduroy at sixteen or more ribs per inch. The 11-wale cloth used on our jackets has a more pronounced rib than that fine-wale category.

Wale count does not tell you the fabric weight. Eleven wales does not mean eleven ounces, and a big rib is not a guarantee of better cloth. You still need to look at the yarn, the finishing and the garment made from it.

Manchester had a whole world of ribbed and raised cloth

A good place to start is a small book with a lot packed into it. Colonial Williamsburg holds a Manchester textile sample book dated around 1780, attributed to Thomas Smith. It contains 567 fabric samples across 24 pages.

Among them are cotton velvets and corded fabrics in browns, purple, maroon, cream and pink. The museum describes some as similar in appearance to modern velveteen and corduroy. Heavier cotton velveteens, then known as velverets, were used for men’s suits and waistcoats.

This was a busy family of fabrics, with names that do not always match the neat categories on a modern shop page. Fustian is one name you will meet often. It covered a wider range of sturdy cloths; an old mention of fustian does not automatically mean modern corduroy.

That sample book also puts paid to the idea that old cotton clothes had to come in one dutiful shade of brown. The manufacturers had a much larger paint box.

The president who wore cords

By the early nineteenth century, there are clear written accounts of people wearing corduroy. Some are surprisingly familiar names.

Monticello gathers contemporary descriptions of Thomas Jefferson’s clothes. In 1802, William Plumer noted his old corduroy breeches alongside a brown coat, red waistcoat and worn slippers. Frances Few described him at dinner in dark corduroy breeches in 1808.

These were knee-length breeches, not a pair of modern five-pocket trousers. Still, it is a useful reminder that corduroy was not confined to one job or social class. It could turn up in a president’s wardrobe as well as working clothes. Apparently the slippers were more of a talking point.

Was it really the cloth of kings?

The attractive explanation is that corduroy comes from the French corde du roi, or “cord of the king”. J. Herbert Cooke was already dismissing that story in his 1922 book, The Velvet and Corduroy Industry.

There is no need to give the cloth a royal backstory. Sample books, clothes and accounts of the people who wore them give us plenty to work with.

Soft cloth, sharp tools

Cooke’s book takes us into the making of cotton pile fabrics. Before a jacket could feel soft, the woven cloth needed a careful encounter with a blade.

In hand cutting, a narrow guide travelled beneath the threads that needed opening. The blade followed the channel, cutting the floats while leaving the base intact. A small obstruction could send it through the back of the fabric. That was an expensive way to find a fault.

The work also involved a lot of walking. Cooke describes hand-cutting velvet stretched over long frames, with a worker covering twelve or thirteen miles in a day. That figure is for the velvet process he describes, rather than a daily total for every corduroy cutter. It gives a sense of the effort hidden in a soft surface.

The wider trade had a strong presence around Manchester. Lymm Heritage Centre’s research records fustian cutting in the village and the poorly paid work, including child labour, behind it. Its earliest identified local cutter, William Clayton in 1804, also worked as a gamekeeper.

By 1922, Cooke described hand cutting of corduroy as almost gone. His account of the Smith cord-cutting machine shows a different arrangement: a row of small circular knives, with a knife and guide for each rib. Cloth moved through the machine while many channels were cut together.

There was even a stop mechanism. If a guide met a hole or fault and dropped out, the machine stopped. Faster cutting was useful. Turning a little hole into a much longer tear was less so.

When extra weight was doing a sales job

One of Cooke’s less charming details concerns cheap corduroy padded out with bone size, a glue-like dressing, and other filling ingredients. In his account, this made poor cloth seem heavier and more substantial. He also complained about the smell.

So a customer could pick up a reassuringly weighty piece of corduroy and be impressed by something other than the cotton. It is a fairly grubby footnote to such a comfortable fabric.

Cooke was promoting British manufacturing, and his book has plenty of trade opinions. His criticism was aimed at particular poor-quality cloth, rather than every old pair of cords. But the shopping lesson holds up: weight alone is not quality.

The yarn, the way the pile is held in the base, and the finishing all matter. So do the seams and fit once the cloth becomes clothing. A large number cannot do all the work for you.

Corduroy went underground, into the fields and out into the woods

The two colliers pictured at the start of this chapter were photographed in Aberdare around 1900. Their clothes give us a close look at corduroy doing a demanding job.

Amgueddfa Cymru identifies the younger man’s trousers as corduroy, which was gradually replacing moleskin in this setting. It also records features at the knees, called “yorks”, intended to help the wearer kneel.

That small detail is worth looking at. The fabric was only one part of a working garment. The shape had to let a person get into the position their job required. Here, corduroy sits with a waistcoat, flannel shirt, scarf and cap, rather than a carefully matched outfit.

It appeared in outdoor leisure clothes too. An 1879 Smithsonian catalogue of the 1876 Philadelphia exhibition lists a corduroy hunter’s coat, trousers and vest. It is a firm record of the fabric doing that job long before today’s corduroy hunting-style jackets.

Early US Forest Service uniforms provide another example. Historian Frank J. Harmon records corduroy as a permitted and popular choice for the business-coat style, and cites supervisor Louis A. Barrett’s praise for how long his uniform lasted.

Not every wearer felt quite so at home. In the Forest Service history Men Who Matched the Mountains, A. O. Waha recalled arriving in New Mexico in 1905 in a brown-flecked corduroy riding suit made in New Haven. Beside the local rangers, he felt rather conspicuously dressed.

The same cloth could be ordinary workwear in one place and a slightly awkward outfit choice in another. Corduroy has always been capable of both.

The same cloth could dress up

It would be easy to turn this into a tidy story in which corduroy began as workwear and became fashionable much later. The surviving clothes are less tidy, and more interesting.

London Museum holds this Lewis and Allenby fashion drawing from 1900–1910. The word “corduroy” is written on the sheet. The design has a high neck, full sleeves, a shaped waist and decorative details around the cuffs and hem.

This is a proposed dress on paper, rather than a surviving finished garment. Even so, it puts corduroy into a very different wardrobe from the miners’ trousers photographed at about the same time. The fabric could be useful without looking plain.

A Sydney suit with a rather unusual owner

The dark green three-piece suit above was made by David Jones in Sydney around 1930–1940. Its jacket, waistcoat and trousers are cotton corduroy. The Powerhouse collection record says it was probably made to measure when the department store had a tailoring department.

It belonged to Dr Charles Albert Monticone, chief Government Interpreter at the Sydney Courthouse and an expert in handwriting and fingerprints. A useful person to have around if the signature on a document looked a little too creative.

The jacket has padded shoulders and flap pockets. The trousers have a button fly and buttons for braces. It is a complete tailored suit, not a work jacket being pressed into service for a smart occasion.

Alongside the Edwardian dress drawing, it shows that corduroy’s dressier life was well under way before the seventies claimed it.

Corduroy in the Women’s Land Army

During the Second World War, corduroy breeches formed part of the Women’s Land Army uniform. The Museum of English Rural Life preserves a particularly useful pair: light brown breeches made in 1944 and worn by Beatrice Clasper.

The museum’s object record includes the label details. They were size No. 2, intended for someone 5 ft to 5 ft 3 in tall, with a 27–29 inch waist and 39–41 inch hips. Laces tightened them at the knee.

That label is a nice little piece of clothing history in its own right. “Size No. 2” did not mean much without the body measurements beside it. Anyone who has compared two modern brands’ idea of a medium will recognise the problem.

The Kent threshing team in the photograph gives those surviving uniform pieces a working setting. There are boots, breeches, work coats and sleeves rolled up around a large piece of farm machinery. The clothes had things to get on with.

MERL’s exhibition also records women adapting their kit. Doreen Thorp made shorts by cutting down standard-issue dungarees. Those shorts were not corduroy breeches, but the story shows how little patience practical work can have for a perfectly tidy uniform rule.

Corduroy’s working life included women as well as men. Putting the garments beside the people helps make that clear.

The seventies had some fun with it

By the early 1970s, a corduroy suit could take a much less sober shape than Dr Monticone’s three-piece.

This Colin Cole suit in the New Zealand Fashion Museum was bought by Geoffrey Bailey in Auckland in the early 1970s. It pairs a belted Norfolk-style jacket with knickerbockers, trousers that finish below the knee. The jacket has decorative pleats and a large matching buckle.

It takes familiar outdoor-clothing shapes and makes an outfit with quite a lot to say. The museum places it in the brief late-sixties and early-seventies fashion for knickerbockers, promoted for both men and women. Cole’s venture into menswear was short, which makes the surviving suit especially useful.

You do not have to want the whole outfit to enjoy it. The brown corduroy is familiar. The proportions are doing something rather different.

Nor did every seventies suit have enormous flares. Maine Historical Society preserves a burnt-orange Beale & Inman corduroy suit from around 1970, owned by curator Christopher Monkhouse. Its trousers are straighter than the decade’s usual fancy-dress shorthand would suggest.

Robert Redford and the corduroy blazer

For a seventies corduroy outfit that is easy to borrow, there is Robert Redford. In this on-set interview photograph, he wears a brown corduroy blazer, an open checked shirt and blue jeans. No matching trousers required.

The photograph was taken on the recreated Washington Post newsroom set for All the President’s Men, released in 1976. Redford played reporter Bob Woodward. The clothes fit that world: a jacket with proper lapels, but enough softness and wear to look comfortable through a long day.

The blazer gives the outfit some shape. The corduroy texture, checked shirt and denim keep it relaxed. It looks put together without looking precious, which is a large part of the appeal of a good corduroy jacket.

It also shows how little you need to make the fabric work. A plain pair of jeans and a shirt leave the ribs to do their bit. Redford supplies the movie-star face, but the rest of the outfit is fairly straightforward.

The range is the interesting part. Corduroy could be a uniform, a quietly smart suit or a fairly adventurous purchase. There was never just one correct corduroy look.

What to look for in a corduroy jacket now

Our brown corduroy hunting jacket and navy version are two current ways to wear the fabric. They use heavyweight 11-wale, 100% cotton corduroy, with a relaxed cut and room for a shirt or light knit.

The shape has a clear Bedale influence: raglan sleeves, a substantial front fastening and large lower pockets. Raglan sleeves run up towards the collar instead of joining at a conventional shoulder seam. Bellows pockets have folded sides that let them expand.

Here, that familiar country-jacket shape is made in soft corduroy. The body and lower pockets have cotton plaid lining, while the separate hand-warmer pockets are lined with corduroy. A 10-gauge YKK ring-pull zip sits behind the snap-fastened front flap.

The brown jacket keeps the collar close in colour to the body. The navy jacket has a contrasting brown collar. Either is easy to wear with dark selvedge jeans, olive fatigue pants or a plain Oxford shirt. A flannel shirt adds another soft layer when it gets colder.

These jackets offer much less resistance to rain and wind than a waxed Bedale. Choose them for the texture, comfort and everyday shape in cool, dry conditions. For the waxed side of the family, there is a separate chapter on the history of waxed jackets.

Check the brown jacket’s size guide or navy jacket’s size guide before ordering. The website sizes differ from the sewn-in labels, and the guides show both. The HSS sizing guide explains how to compare measurements.

Looking back at the clothes in this story, the appeal is quite easy to understand. Corduroy gives a plain garment something you can see and feel. It can handle a serious cut or a much more playful one. You can borrow that texture without borrowing the entire outfit.

So wear the ribs with whatever makes sense for your day. The miners, Land Girls, tailors and seventies shoppers all found their own use for them. There is still room for yours.

Explore the current jackets and coats, or continue reading about denim jackets, chore coats, jeans and OG-107 fatigue pants. Find every published chapter on The History of series page.