Madras (cloth)

Madras is a lightweight cotton fabric with typically patterned texture and plaid design, used primarily for summer clothing such as pants, shorts, dresses, and jackets. The fabric takes its name from the former name of the city of Chennai in India.

Madras today is available as plaid patterns in regular cotton, seersucker and as patchwork madras, meaning cutting several madras plaid fabrics into squares or rectangles and sewing them back together to form a mixed pattern of various plaids.

Authentic Madras comes from Chennai (Madras); both sides of the cloth must bear the same pattern; it must be handwoven (evidenced by the small flaws in the fabric). Cotton madras is woven from a fragile, short-staple cotton fiber that can’t be combed, only carded, resulting in bumps known as slubs which are thick spots in the yarn that give madras its unique texture. The cotton is hand-dyed after being spun into yarn, woven and finished in some 200 small villages in the Madras area.

Madras fabric is generally regarded as belonging to the peasant class in its native India. Dutch traders arrived in India in the early 1600s to trade in the local calico cloth, followed by the British. The English East India Company sought quality textiles, finding the small fishing village of Madraspatnam (Madras), and the company established a trading post there in the mid-17th century. The first madras material was a muslin overprinted or embroidered in elaborate patterns with vegetable dyes. To secure a reliable labor supply, the English East India Company promised a 30-year exemption from duties for Indian weavers in the area, and thus within a year nearly 400 families of weavers had settled in Madras. Undyed madras cloth became popular in Europe because it was lightweight and breathable. Cotton plaid madras reached America in 1718 as a donation to the Collegiate School of Connecticut (now known as Yale University).Sears offered the first madras shirt for sale to the American consumer in its 1897 catalog.

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Wikipedia