The Wardrobe in Translation: Archaic Cloth Names and Their Modern Equivalents

A costume maker working from a portrait or an old inventory runs into a particular kind of wall: the cloth named in the source no longer exists under that name, or no longer exists at all. A doublet of fustian, a gown of samite, a corset of coutil, a soldier's coat of melton. Some of these words name cloths you can still buy, some name cloths that have quietly turned into something else, and some name cloths that vanished with the world that wore them. The work of historical sewing is partly translation: turning an archaic cloth name into something you can actually order by the yard.

This catalogue now records the old names alongside the living ones, and where a historical cloth has a close modern descendant, the entry points to it directly. Here are a few of the most useful translations.

Silk for kings: samite

Samite was the most prestigious silk of the medieval world, a heavy compound twill shot through with gold and silver thread, worn by emperors and wrapped around relics. Nothing sold today is woven quite the same way, but its visual heirs are the figured silks. A good silk brocade or damask carries the same weight of pattern and the same play of light, and is what most reproductions reach for.

The workhorse and its children: fustian

Fustian is the opposite of samite, the stout cotton cloth of medieval and industrial labor, and it is the rare archaic name that turned into several modern ones. Cut and ribbed, fustian became corduroy; cut flat, moleskin; cut soft, velveteen. A costumer who needs fustian is really choosing among its descendants, depending on whether the garment wants a cord, a smooth nap, or a short pile.

Built to resist: coutil

Coutil is a younger word, born with the nineteenth-century corset, and here the translation is almost direct. It is still woven and sold as coutil, a tight herringbone cotton made to take the strain of lacing without stretching, and where that is unavailable a heavy herringbone drill is the standard substitute. It is the one cloth on this list you can usually still buy by its own name.

Cloth for weather: melton and its kin

For outerwear, the historical names cluster around heavy, fulled, weatherproof wool: melton, frieze, kersey, drugget, russet. These were the coatings and cloaks of people who worked outdoors, dense enough to turn rain and wind. Melton is still made and is the readiest modern stand-in for most of them, with loden and heavy felted wool close behind.

Reading the translations

None of these substitutions is exact, and that is the honest part of the craft. A modern silk brocade is not Byzantine samite, and a bolt of herringbone drill is not nineteenth-century coutil. But the point of the equivalence is not to deceive; it is to get a maker close enough, in weight and drape and surface, that the finished garment behaves the way the original did. Where this catalogue lists a modern equivalent, read it as the cloth to start from, not the cloth to claim.