The Cord That Binds

There are some things you don’t need the cool messenger of fashion to drop into your mind to make you like it. For me, this was corduroy. I have worn it now for so long, and through all seasons, that I can’t even remember the first time I saw it, though it was certainly long before the age of sixteen when I laid eyes on a pair of sofas in a neighbor’s house that were covered in a dark blue wide-wale cord I immediately decided I would copy the day I could own a house of my own. 

Corduroy, as that particular encounter taught me, is a fabric of remarkable versatility. Whether, as the story goes, it was born on high in the royal courts of France (it is, after all, a ridged velvet) or on low among rural peasants in England (it is, depending on the weave of the pile, extremely durable), the fabric is one that can rise to the level of a smoking jacket, confer an Ivy League I.Q. to a blazer, suave bookishness to a suit, enviable nonchalance to a weekend pair of pants, and nothing less than style at the level of chic to mere furniture. It is—whether wide wale or needle cord or pin cord, as stiff as denim or as soft as cashmere—one charismatic cloth.   

And it isn’t like any of its cousins. Unlike, say, wool or linen, corduroy is one of those things that requires full commitment—you can’t just dabble in it. Think of the choice of whether you are or are not into corduroy as an exclusively binary thing, like Godfather I or Godfather II, John or Paul, brown liquor or clear, Sampras or Federer, Patek or Rolex, mustard or mayonnaise. You either are or are not a corduroy person, for one piece is never enough. 

Let’s keep it positive, and look at who has been and is such a type: Robert Redford in a tan cord suit in “All the President’s Men”; Donald Sutherland in a brown cord suit in “Animal House”; Gianni Agnelli in olive cord trousers at his estate, Villar Perosa; Wes Anderson in various outré shades of cord on and off the set; and, the newest member of this distinguished pack, James Bond, who, in “No Time to Die,” endures the blast of an I.E.D., a brutal motorcycle chase, and the wholesale destruction of both his DB5 and romantic relationship to Madeleine Swann in a three-button cord suit in a light shade that he puts on thinking he’s just going to breakfast. By the time this action sequence in that suit is done in the movie, the pure personality of corduroy—its warmth and texture, strength and composure, the graceful way it hangs with sangfroid under the pressure of automatic gunfire—comes very close to completely stealing the scene. If nothing else, to me, that suit proves itself to be the match of any other unusual weave the spy has ever worn, including the baby-blue terrycloth onesie Sean Connery sported in “Goldfinger.” 

This is because, as its embellished history suggest, corduroy is eternal. What other look with such richly iconic associations could once again deliver yet another new twist on who exactly the corduroy kind of man is? Cinematically, at least, many might have thought of corduroy before as nothing more than thedark brownuniform for a decidedly unmacho character like Alvie Singer in “Annie Hall”—the sartorial equivalent of a man with a concave chest who reads Kierkegaard for fun in horn rimmed glasses. Butcook that shade to khaki in a Mediterranean sun, slip it on a man with a license to kill, and a fabric proves it can also play against type. That is perhaps the greatest of corduroy’s traits—itgives tothe person who makes the choice to wear it the strength of true individuality, no matter what he actually does for a living.