Coutil

Coutil is a tightly woven cotton cloth, classically a fine herringbone, engineered to resist stretching in any direction. It was developed in the nineteenth century for corsetry, where a dense, low-give cloth was needed to anchor boning and hold against the tension of lacing without distorting. The same close weave that made it useless for draping made it ideal for structure, and it remains the standard foundation cloth for corsets and structured bodices today. Its name comes from the French for ticking, the cloth once used to case mattresses.

Named for

From the French coutil, ticking, from an older coute, a quilt or feather bed; the dense cloth that once cased bedding came to mean the cloth that structured corsets.