Corduroy
- Eric Langlois
- Mar 14
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
I used to commute on foot and by public transportation, close to three hours a day round trip. While a good portion of that journey was on the climate-controlled trains of the MBTA, I would still have to walk a couple miles each day, no matter the weather. Because of my commutes through New England
winters, I built up a collection of clothes that were warm, tough, and would still look nice when I got to work. As you can imagine, I ended up wearing a lot of corduroy.
I’d consider corduroy one of the less-talked about winter materials, often overshadowed by tweeds and flannels in the cold weather conversation. This may be because of its traditional connotations, calling to mind dusty libraries and prep-school graduates. Because of its cotton construction though, it has a long history in association with outdoor labor.
Corduroy has a thick, soft feel similar to velvet, but while velvet has connotations of wealth and nobility, the durable cotton corduroy is best known for its resilience which has made it popular for outdoor pursuits. Like roughout leather, corduroy has a napped finish that resists damage and marking, essentially providing a layer of armor over the base fabric, and this layer naturally insulates the wearer as well. The velveteen layer is divided into rows, or wales, which give corduroy it’s characteristic texture. Standard corduroy has 10-12 wales per inch. Wide wale has fewer cords per inch, thus wider wales, while narrow wale or pincord has more, usually 16 or above.
Corduroy is probably most common today in casual tailoring. Due to the weight and relative stiffness of corduroy material, pleated trousers are common but pants in a flat front cut are also easy to find. It is a mainstay in Ivy Style tailoring, where its soft, unfussy texture works well with the relaxed silhouette of soft-shouldered suits and sport coats. Corduroy suits also had a mainstream heyday in the 1970s, when all of a sudden, three-piece suits in earth-tone corduroy with wide lapels were in seemingly every store.Today, suits can usually be found in standard and narrow wale corduroy, although they’re not as
common as they were in the mid-century.
The connotations of corduroy are informal and almost inescapably old-fashioned. This allows it to play well with tweed, as thick corduroy trousers naturally partner with a hairy tweed sport coat. The rumpled texture of corduroy jackets also meshes perfectly with faded blue jeans, both having the same worn-in, comfortable feel. A turtleneck sweater or open-collar button-down shirt completes the look.
While it is generally associated with tailored clothes, corduroy is used in basically every way that cotton twill is. Corduroy baseball caps are easy to find in fall and winter, offering an alternative to traditional wool ball caps. Corduroy jackets for delivery workers, mechanics, and other laborers were extremely common in the mid-20th century, which is why the official jacket of the Future Farmers of America (which I covered in a previous article) is made of corduroy to this day. Narrow-wale corduroy is commonly used to make blue-jean style five-pocket trousers which hit the same casual sweet spot as a relaxed pair of chinos. Rugged denim jackets, Barbour coats, and canvas chore coats use corduroy for their collars, to provide a soft yet durable interface between the rough jacket and the wearer’s neck.
Even shorts, which are not commonly associated with fall-winter materials, are available in corduroy. Short-inseam corduroy shorts, usually known as “OP” shorts after the popular 70s/80s brand Ocean Pacific, have a vintage, beachy vibe. In fact, corduroy was common beachwear in the surfing boom of that period, being used for shorts, trousers, and casual jackets or overshirts. It offered a combination of easy laundering, resilience, and warmth on the beach when the weather changed or the sun went down. Brands like Birdwell, Hammies, and Hang Ten keep the association between surfing and corduroy alive today, with shorts, hoodies, and zipper jackets.
Corduroy may carry connotations of wealthy landowners and dusty college professors, and there's nothing wrong with that. When I pull on a pair of corduroy trousers, I like to imagine myself seated by the fire in the sitting room of a country manor house. But corduroy is also a material that belongs to hard-working truck drivers and laid-back surfers. It's an egalitarian fabric that we can all enjoy.
Eric Langlois is a writer, menswear professional, and history enthusiast based on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
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