Madras

What is Madras?

Madras is a summer cotton with a soft, uneven feel and bold checks. The yarn comes from a short, delicate staple that is too fragile to comb, so it is only carded, leaving thick spots called slubs that roughen the surface. An authentic piece is woven by hand, shows the same pattern on both faces, and takes its colours from natural dyes. Around Chennai the fabric is spun, dyed, woven and finished in about two hundred villages. It breathes easily, which is why hot weather brings it out. It is cut into shirts, shorts, dresses, jackets and the lungi, a tube of cloth wrapped around the waist.

Where does Madras come from?

The cloth takes its name from Chennai's old name, Madras. By the sixteenth century, local weavers printed it with flowers and religious imagery. Dutch merchants came hunting calico early in the seventeenth century, and the English followed, opening a trading post at Madrasapattinam, then a fishing village. The earliest madras was a muslin, overprinted or embroidered with plant dyes. To keep weavers working, the East India Company waived their duties for thirty years, and close to four hundred weaving families had moved in within a year. Plain, undyed lengths found European buyers for being airy. A checked cloth went to a Connecticut college in 1718 that later grew into Yale, and a madras shirt appeared in an American catalogue, Sears's, in 1897. A shirt maker, David J. Anderson, lent the fabric his name in 1844, though the word was older.

How is Madras made?

Every authentic length is woven on hand looms, and the tiny irregularities are proof of the hand at work. The cotton has a short, weak staple, so spinners card it rather than comb it, leaving slubs, small knots of thicker yarn, along each thread. Dyeing happens after the yarn is spun, done by hand with colours pressed from plants, and the finished cloth comes out of roughly two hundred villages near Madras. Turn the fabric over and the design is identical on either face. Because every length is coloured by hand, no two checks match, and that is part of the charm.

Colours, motifs and borders

The classic look is plaid: bright bands crossing to form checks, coloured with dyes pressed from plants. Early madras carried flowers and sacred images on fine muslin instead. Today the pattern comes on plain cotton or on seersucker, a puckered weave that holds the cloth off the skin. There is also patchwork, in which several checked lengths are cut up and stitched together again, so one garment mixes many different plaids.

How Madras is worn

This is a tailor's cloth rather than a drape. In India it becomes lungis, the ankle-length tubes many men wear about the house, and summer shirts and shorts. In the early nineteenth-century Philippines it was the saya, the skirt half of the baro't saya dress, and the trousers worn with the barong tagalog shirt. American wear is casual: short-sleeved checked shirts, dresses, jackets. Antigua and Barbuda folds the fabric into a national costume.

When Madras is worn

In India this is everyday hot-weather cloth. In the United States it began as a sign of money: during the Depression of the 1930s, only travellers who could afford Caribbean holidays came home with checked madras shirts. After the Second World War the baby-boom generation took up the plaid, and the sixties were the fabric's peak years. Since 1994 it has served as national dress in Antigua and Barbuda, picked through a public design contest.

Styles of Madras

Not everything sold under the name is the real thing. In the nineteenth-century Philippines, imported cambaya cost so much that Chinese factories and local workshops turned out cheaper copies for ordinary buyers. Today the name covers plain cotton checks, seersucker and patchwork. Machine-woven cloth lacks the slubs and slight faults of the handloom original, and only the genuine article carries the same design on both faces.

Care and buying

The dyes run, and that is expected. Exporter C. P. Krishnan told his American buyer to wash the cloth gently in cold water; the warning never reached Brooks Brothers, and customers saw their garments fade. Advertisers then flipped the fault into a promise, 'guaranteed to bleed', since repeated washing settles the colours into softer, muted shades. Wash in cool water with mild soap and let the plaid change.

What Madras means

A chance deal sealed the cloth's American fame. In 1958 the importer William Jacobson bought ten thousand yards from C. P. Krishnan, an exporter in Chennai, at a dollar a yard, cloth so fresh it smelled of vegetable dyes and sesame oil. When the colours ran, the adman David Ogilvy turned the flaw into a slogan and sales soared. Far from India the fabric became an identity marker too: in 1994 Antigua and Barbuda adopted a national dress in madras, designed by the artist Heather Doram after a nationwide competition.

Questions people ask about Madras

Good reading and sources

• BBC World ServiceBBC, Article

• Madras (cloth) on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data