Plate No. 082fabric
The open, sized weave of the tailor's interfacing.
- First documented
- Middle Ages
- Origin
- Central Asia
- Fiber
- cotton, linen
- Weave
- open plain weave, heavily sized
- Family
- plain
Plate No. 082 · fabric
Buckram
Buckram is cloth made rigid: a loose, open plain weave saturated with a stiffening size, paste, glue, or starch, until it holds a shape on its own. It is the hidden skeleton of tailoring and bookbinding, the interfacing inside hat brims, belts, collars, and the spine and boards of hardcover books. The medieval word once named a prized fine cloth, but the meaning hardened, literally, into the stiffener. Shakespeare made it a byword for padding when Falstaff lied about the men in buckram who set upon him.
Named for
By tradition from Bukhara, the Silk Road city, though the medieval cloth that bore the name was a fine fabric, not the stiffener it later became.