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Tomorrow morning the calendar turns to October, and we would like to put in a word for the cloth that owns the month. Corduroy has spent fifty years being apologized for — the professor's elbow patches, the trousers at the back of a father's closet — and the last few falls quietly becoming one of the most interesting fabrics on our racks. If you have been wondering how to wear corduroy without dressing as a decade, this post is for you. The short answer: the corduroy changed. The rules for wearing it changed with it.
The cloth, reconsidered
What the good mills are weaving now bears little resemblance to the schoolroom cord of memory. The wales run finer — baby cord, sometimes nearly needlecord — the cotton carries a measure of stretch, and the colours are garment-dyed into that slightly sun-faded depth flat dyeing cannot fake. Berwich sends us corduroy trousers this fall cut from a Zegna cotton-cashmere cloth ($525), which tells you what company the fabric keeps these days. Run a hand across it blind and you would guess velvet.
We have argued all season that texture is what reads across a room — hopsack, flannel, mélange knits. Corduroy is the most textured cloth a man can wear before he reaches for tweed. Light falls into the wale and stays there, so the colour shifts as you move. Next to it, a flat cotton chino looks like printer paper. In October, when the light in this city goes low and golden by four in the afternoon, that depth is doing quiet work on your behalf.
How to wear corduroy: three rules
First: one corduroy piece per outfit. Corduroy trousers under a merino crew, or a corduroy shirt under a wool jacket — never both at once. Head-to-toe cord is where the costume accusations come from, and they are earned. The fabric is emphatic; it wants everything around it to be smooth.
Second: keep the wale fine on weekdays. Baby cord in a trim cut passes in every tie-optional office in this city — it reads as texture, not nostalgia. Wide-wale is a weekend cloth, and honestly we would rather see it on a jacket than on trousers, where it thickens the leg.
Third: pair it with things that have their own polish. A fine-gauge knit, a proper collar, calfskin or suede underneath — corduroy next to a worn sneaker and a hoodie slides straight back to the rummage sale. The cloth is casual; the company it keeps should not be.
The pieces we would start with
Start with the trouser. Mason's cognac brown corduroy chino ($340) arrived two weeks ago and is exactly the modern article: fine wale, a little stretch, a slim Torino cut that hems clean like any chino. The colour is the argument — we have said since September that brown is this season's navy, and cognac cord under a navy or cream knit is the easiest proof of it. The same baby-cord program comes in beige and a rich blue, and the rest of our trouser wall is in the casual pants collection.
Then the shirt. Stenströms cuts its navy corduroy shirt ($300) from a cotton so fine you could mistake the cloth for flannel until the light catches the wale. Worn open-collared under a grey or camel sport jacket, it does what we asked of knits at a business dinner earlier this month: it gives the jacket something to talk to. Mother-of-pearl buttons on corduroy is the kind of detail that tells you a shirtmaker is taking the fabric seriously.
The October window
One honest caveat. Corduroy is a dry-cold cloth. Cotton holds water the way wool politely declines to, so when the freezing November rain arrives, flannel takes the baton and cord waits for the crisp days. Its true season in Montreal runs from this week to the first slush — which is precisely why we say buy it now and wear it now, not in December when the sidewalks have other plans. Care is simple: brush with the pile after wearing, steam rather than press, and never iron the wale flat — a flattened wale is the one alteration nobody can reverse.
The reversible kind we handle daily. Corduroy hems, tapers, and takes in like any good cotton trouser, and our tailors on Decarie Boulevard do it in-house. Book a fitting, or walk in with the October light and try cognac cord against the mirror. The month was made for it.
