The Geography of Cloth Names

Read enough entries in this catalogue and a pattern surfaces that has nothing to do with weave or color: a startling share of fabric names are simply the names of places. Not metaphors, not inventors, but towns and ports, frozen into the language at the moment a particular cloth came to market from a particular spot. The list of cloth names turns out to be a map of medieval and early-modern trade, and you can almost trace the old routes by reading labels.

Towns that turned into cloth

The clearest cases are European weaving towns. Denim is serge de Nimes, the serge of Nimes in southern France, worn down to a single syllable. Its cousin jean takes its name from Genoa, called Gene in old French, where a similar cotton cloth was made. Chambray is from Cambrai in northern France; duffel from the Flemish town of Duffel near Antwerp; worsted from Worstead in Norfolk; kersey from a village in Suffolk; melton from Melton Mowbray, the English hunting town. Even jersey is the cloth of the Channel Island that knitted it.

Ports and far places

The richest names came from the ports of the long India and Silk Road trades, because Europe named the cloth for wherever its ship had touched. Calico is from Calicut on the Malabar coast; madras from the southern Indian port; muslin reached Europe through Mosul in Iraq; nankeen is the buff cotton of Nanjing; shantung the wild silk of Shandong; damask the figured silk of Damascus. The places named the cloth even when they had only handled it, not made it.

What the names remember, and forget

A place-name on a cloth is a fossil of trade, and like any fossil it can mislead. Denim has not come from Nimes for a very long time. Paisley names a Scottish mill town for a motif that began in Kashmir, the copy outliving the original in the language. Madras and calico long outgrew their ports. The name fixes a moment, the first time a cloth and a market met, and then the cloth wanders off and lives its own life while the name stays put.

That gap between the name and the thing is the whole reason this catalogue keeps a paper trail. The name tells you where to start looking, not what is true now. Pull the thread on almost any fabric and it leads, eventually, back to a dot on an old map.