Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Corduroy

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Learn 12 minutes worth of stuff about corduroy today! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.

There's JJ, brand new guest producer. We've got this revolving door going on. It's just like a beautiful, and this is short stuff. Yeah. JJ's, he's a pro though, like it's not like you can just show up here and take a ticket like you're at the deli. No, no, nothing like that.

This isn't, this isn't Katz's deli. Although I'd be pretty happy for once. Nor is it Dr. Katz's therapy office. Anytime I hear of Dr. Katz, I think of, I think it was Damarera. He used to be a regular on that. And he used to go like, Dr. Katz, cha, cha, cha. And it's always, it's been in my head since like 1993.

Oh man, Dr. Katz was great. I miss it. It really was. Let's go watch some after this, okay? All right, but let's talk about cord of Roy first. Sure, sure. That's fine. We can talk about that.

Cause you see him wearing it in honor of today. I know you're wearing some rust colored corduroy pants that I would say are maybe a, probably about a 12, 10 to 12 whale. Yeah, cause- Maybe eight. They're pretty standard Levi's cords, whatever that whale is.

And if you're wondering what we're talking about, I'll tell you here in a minute after we get to a little bit of the history here, which is debatable apparently. It is. Because it's either French in origin, corduroy, the king's cord. But my money is a little more toward

what the Brooks Brothers say, which is no, mate. It was street wear in 18th century England. I don't think the Brooks Brothers sound like that. No, what do they sound like? Oh, really? I can just think of Albert Brooks and Super Dave Osborn as the Brooks Brothers. Oh, that's good.

Why Dave Osborn? He's not a Brooks, is he? They're brothers, man. Believe it or not. No. Yeah. No. Is that great?

Wow. Man, their parents must have been really cool. Probably so. Okay, so either way, what we're really talking about here is where the origin of the name for the fabric came from. It looks Chuck like corduroy has its roots way further back than that,

that it comes from possibly and probably a type of fabric from dating back to about 200 CE back in ancient Egypt called Fustians. Names after the city where they were made Al Fustat, which is, I think Fustian is still actually a term for certain types of corduroy or certain types of fabric, including corduroy, that are real thick and squishy,

and originally they were pretty coarse. Yeah, but that Brooks Brothers story has a lot of credibility because the word cord, referencing the rows, the ridges, the cords. Which makes sense. And duroy, which is a wool fabric. Right. That sounds like a pretty open and shut case to me now.

Yeah, I'm good. No, I'm with you. I'm going with the Brooks Brothers interpretation too. It was really just the impression you did that I had an issue with. Okay. But the fabric itself, you think, that is Egyptian or Middle Ages,

and then later Egyptian. No, so it was Egyptian first, but it wasn't corded. There weren't whales on it. It was just one thick piece of like velvet kind of, right? Where you have a certain kind of fabric and then woven on top of that fabric is the fabric that makes it kind of plushier, thicker,

sturdier, and that is what cordoroy is at its base. And then that's what they were making for many, many centuries. And then finally, at some point during the Middle Ages, somebody said, hey, I've got a really good idea about this. Let's turn this into cordoroy by cutting rows into this stuff. Right.

What we do know in the United States is that it was first made in Worcester, Mass, in about 1780. And I do need to shout out cordoroy the bear here, because not only does it appear in this House of Works short article on cordoroy, but I have a pretty great cordoroy the bear history, which was I loved that book a lot as a kid.

Sure. Did you? I was aware of it, but I think it was a little ahead of my time. Okay. I think it was ahead of my time too. I mean, I think it predates me, but I loved the story and my mom made,

she got a teddy bear that looked kind of like cordoroy and made him little cordoroy overalls and shorts and what was missing a button. So. That is so sweet. Yeah. I had my very own. That was kind of one of the great things about my mom

is she could really sew. And so she could make me things when they did not exist on the toy market. Oh, that's neat. Or she could save some money and just make her own knockoffs. Well, we did that as well. Right, right. I had more than one T-shirt made from like curtain fabric.

That's hilarious. My mom used to take my T-shirts and like stuff them and turn them into pillows when I outgrew them. Oh, that's sweet. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty sweet. I have no idea where they are anymore, but yeah, I had a few, a few of those.

That's very nice. I had one that said BMX. Oh yeah. That'd be pretty cool to have today. It really would. So we mentioned the whales and I think we should get to that before we take our little break.

The whales are those rigid little ridges. W-A-L-E-S. I'm so glad you spelled it. Yeah. And it's the higher the whale count, the smaller the little ridge is. So if you have worn one of those really fine sort of like Kodoroi oxfords,

I'm not a huge fan of them for myself. I don't mind the way they look, but I've never liked them for me personally, but that's about a 16 whale. What don't you like about them? It's just not my bag. I'm not big on collar turds period. They ruffle my neck and my chin.

Yeah. But that particular one you just described about the 16 whale cord, I think it's typically called pin cord. Yeah, you have some of those, right? I do not, but I have to say, researching Kodoroi made me want to go buy some Kodoroi stuff, so I think it's in the offing.

Yeah, my problem with my cords is they really wear out in the knees very fast. Yeah. And I'm not even a guy who spends a lot of time on his knees. Yeah, that's good to say. I'm not scrubbing floors much or anything. So I don't know what the deal is.

Okay. Well, that's a mystery. I think we can go to a commercial break on. All right, we'll figure it out. Well, now when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know.

Stuff you should know. All right. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the co-classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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All right, Chuck, we're back and let's talk a little more about how corduroy is made, right? Cause this blew my mind when I finally saw some diagrams and I understood it. All right, let's hear it. So with a typical fabric, you take two different sets of yarns and you weave them together perpendicular to one another and you have fabric.

When you're making a fustian, like a thicker, fluffier fabric, like say terrycloth or velvet or corduroy, terrycloth. You, it's very nice, isn't it? You use a third set of yarn and so what you have is that basic, you know, flat fabric and then woven into the top of that is that thicker pile of fabric called the worst, right?

Yes. Okay. And so just leaving it like that, you have something like velvet or again, like terrycloth, which you love so much. But if you want to make corduroy, you take that, that fustian fabric and then you take a very sharp set of scissors

or something like that and you cut a line all the way along the length of the fabric. And what you've just done is created a two-wale bolt of corduroy, but no one's going to wear that, right? Yeah. And two-wale bolt is a great band name, by the way. It is. That's funny because I was just going to say

the only person who'd wear that is somebody like Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But he'll wear anything as pants as we've seen over the years. So you start making more cuts and more cuts. And like you were saying, depending on how supple or nice you want to make the fabric, the more cuts you're going to make.

But however many cuts there are, however many ridges there are per inch, that's the whale count and that's kind of describes how thick the ridges are. But the point is when you make that cut, what you've done is cut that top layer of fabric, the additional third set of yarn. And you've cut it into two and you've exposed

the other traditional two yarn set of fabric underneath. And that's what corduroy is. It's a raised ridge that used to be all one complete set of yarn. And then there's valleys that are the fabric below. Yeah. I've been practicing this for days. That's good.

And it still didn't go according to plan. Like I want to cut my thigh with the razor blade right now. I'm so frustrated, Chuck. No, I think that was perfect actually. What you end up with and how they actually refer to it in the industry is a three-dimensional fabric, a three-dimensional pile weave and like you've mentioned, velvet and terry cloth are also three-dimensional fabrics.

And it's pretty great. They say in here that you need to steam or fluff corduroy. I don't think that's the case or at least I've never done that. No, only a Brooks Brothers would do that. But I do have a pretty rockin' corduroy coat from back in the day. I mean, this thing is, I probably had it for 20 years

and I got it secondhand and it is beautiful and it's got a really fat whales on it. And I don't pull it out much anymore. It used to be my New York coat but I've evolved a little bit since then but I still have it and it's really a nice coat. That is, yeah, I think I know the coat you're talking about. I mean, they're confusing you or Joe McCormack

has one that he likes to rock a lot. It's probably Joe because I haven't worn mine in years. Okay, but you got your secondhand 20-something years ago. So that would have coincided roughly with the last corduroy revival. And the first one I remember was in the 90s. Do you remember that? Yeah, I mean, they were big in the 50s,

certainly in the 60s and 70s. And then in the 90s, I think that's when I got this thing. And I got two, I got one shorter one that had a narrower whale and then this longer one that has the big fat whales. And I think I still have both of them. Is it like a trench coat, a corduroy trench coat? Yeah, it's like a long corduroy coat with the big brown buttons and like a wool lapel.

Is it like a barn coat or something? A what? A barn coat. I'm not sure what that is. It sounds like what you're describing. You're gonna have to wear this in someday. Yeah, I'll bring it in. All right, cool.

Just bring it in for show and tell. Sure. But yeah, so it was kind of big in the 50s, really took off in the late 60s and then really huge in the 70s and then went nowhere until the 90s. And then I guess this thing said in the 2010s it came back or the 2000s it came back in,

which I was not aware of that at all. Well, I've always rocked the cord pants. But over the years, it has ranged from like school uniform fabric to in World War I, low ranking soldiers wore it, work wear if you worked in like a factory because the stuff is pretty warm, because it's thicker.

And it's durable too. Yeah, very durable except in the knees. And then it's, you know, sometimes it's also been looked at as something a little fancier. Right, which apparently originally was, it was sportswear for the upper class. And then somehow just kind of fell out of favor

and became associated with the working class and the lower classes. And then it just kind of stayed that way until like, I think starting in the 20s. For a little while there, it was pretty common as upholstery for cars. Did you know that? Yeah, I have seen a car upholstered in corduroy

and it's pretty awesome. I'll bet it's pretty awesome. The only way that could be any better is if there were like patchwork corduroy on our seats. Now I know the jacket that you're talking about that is Joe's for sure. Yes, I think it even has elbow patches. Yeah, his is more like a blazer.

Sure. Not a duster like yours. That's right. What else you got? I got nothing else, man. I support corduroy. Like knowing a little bit more how it's made. Yeah.

And I say wear it. It's never out of fashion. Up with corduroy. Agreed. If you want to know more about corduroy, by the way, check out Heddles H-E-D-D-E-L-S.com. They have something called corduroy. Read Between the Lines of the Whaled Fabric

by James Smith, and it has a picture that will finally explain, better than I possibly could, how corduroy is made. Very simply. Yes. OK, well, see you guys later, because short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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