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I love corduroy, especially in winter, but every time I put it on I feel like a refugee from the 1970s or the woods. What’s the best way to wear it so it seems contemporary? — Jane, Brooklyn Corduroy is one of those materials that have been with us for so long that it has acquired a whole encyclopedia’s worth of cultural references. There’s academic corduroy, all elbow patches and lamp-lit brown; think Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society.” There’s hippie-chic corduroy, à la old Bob Dylan or Oscar Isaac in “Inside Llewyn Davis.” There’s journalist corduroy; see Robert Redford as Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men.” (Bob, did you really wear a lot of corduroy?) There’s weirdo corduroy, best worn by Wes Anderson and the cast of “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Preppy corduroy. Camp corduroy. Cool corduroy. (Hello, Steve McQueen.) And then there’s fashion corduroy, product of all of the above, since fashion loves a reference, which has periodic surges in popularity but never really goes out of style — for any gender. Recently Gwyneth Paltrow posted an Instagram selfie on her Goop account in which she modeled a pair of camel cords with a button-up white shirt. Katie Holmes, street-style magnet extraordinaire, is a dedicated corduroy model. “It’s perennial,” Wes Gordon, the creative director of Carolina Herrera, said when I asked. He had, it turned out, just worn his own favorite new pair of corduroy pants. “It’s like denim.” ImageLeon Bridges at the Grammy Awards in 2019.Credit...David Crotty/Patrick McMullanCorduroy’s roots go back to ancient Egypt, when the city of Al-Fustat became a center for woven materials and gave its name to a fabric christened “fustian.” That was effectively the ancestral forerunner of corduroy, without the ridges (or what we now call “wales”). Those showed up sometime in the 18th century, and by the 1800s, fustian had become “the proverbial costume of the working-men,” thanks to its toughness, at least according to Friedrich Engels, who memorialized it in “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.starlight princess |