Check republic

The author revisits the enduring appeal of Madras check fabric

Like many American kids, I read S E Hinton's angsty Bildungsroman, The Outsiders, in middle school. First published in 1967, the book features teenage characters with names like Ponyboy, Sodapop and Cherry, who drink and smoke and get into knife fights. The boys belong to two rival gangs, divided along socio-economic lines: the Greasers - the eponymous "Outsiders" - characterised by their long hair and leather biker jackets; and the Socs, short for "Socials", who have "good grades, good cars, good girls, madras and Mustangs and Corvairs". "Madras" here refers to the Socs' predilection for clothing made of madras check, a fabric that was, and is, a powerful metonym for preppy fashion - that whole peculiar complex of styles and affectations with its roots in the Ivy League and Country Club cultures of the north-eastern United States. The Official Preppy Handbook, an obscenely popular satirical guidebook first published in 1980, used madras checks on its dust jacket. In 2011, a website called Ivy Style launched its summer season coverage with what it called "Madras Week"...

Through the 1950s, madras appeared with increasing frequency in magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Gentry, its surging popularity inspired in part by ads for "bleeding Madras" shirts that, thanks to their non-colour fast vegetable dyes, were "guaranteed to bleed". A 1954 ad by David Ogilvy, for a small, family-run shirting company called Hathaway, features a camera-toting gentleman with a jaunty eyepatch and pith helmet, standing near an elephant and a dusty pink Jaipur arcade. The text promises fabrics "woven by Indian cottagers on their handlooms," and notes that "the natural dye-stuffs used by these Indian cottagers aren't completely colour-fast - they fade a little, with washing and sunshine. This gives the shirts a look of good breeding and maturity which no mass-produced fabric can ever aspire to." Ogilvy essentially transformed a perceived flaw into a badge of authenticity...

The last 15 years have seen madras's absorption into the aesthetic lexicon of the hipster urban elite, which sets authenticity as its highest value, in an appropriation that might begin to restore the fabric's origin and complex history. Though in India today madras is still used almost exclusively for lungis, in the United States the fabric has never fully lost its pastel glimmer of tennis courts and highballs.

There is little consensus, however, on the origin of the checked pattern that today bears the name of that city and region. In her book Asian Embroidery, the Delhi-based art historian Jasleen Dhamija dates the first export of checked fabric under the name "madras" to 1660, when British merchants coined the name Real Madras Handkerchief, or RMHK, to describe eight-metre long, 36-inch-wide bolts of fabric that could be cut into three square kerchiefs. Many sources - including a 2004 essay for The New York Times titled "What Hipsters Found in Preppy Closets" - claim madras checks evolved after the arrival of the East India Company as Indian weavers transposed the patterns of Scottish tartans onto colourful cottons. Scholars like Dhamija, though, have uncovered ample evidence to suggest that checked cottons had existed in the regions of southern Andhra Pradesh and Madras for hundreds of years before the British arrived.

Annakaputhur, in south-west Chennai, used to be one of the many villages near Madras whose weavers specialised in checked fabric. One afternoon last February, KB Umapathy, a 50-something-year-old resident descended from a long line of weavers, took me around. "Thirty years ago it was 200 master weavers here," he said. "Now I am the only one." Weaving, he told me, and particularly weaving handloom madras, just isn't profitable anymore, particularly compared to the office jobs that have multiplied in the wake of liberalisation and the IT boom.

Industrial processes have also altered demand in the United States. Once madras had entered the American sartorial vocabulary, consumers no longer needed reasons to purchase the fabric. Though the "bleed" on hand-woven madras was once a valuable trait, it wasn't long before colour-fast dyes replaced vegetable ones, bringing the vogue for "bleeding madras" to an end in the 1970s. Power looms, working from a fixed set of patterns, made viable the mass production of identical weaves, allowing more people to buy into the image of the madras-wearing bon vivant. Today, West Africa remains an important export market for RMHK, much of it woven in Andhra Pradesh. But there, as in the rest of the world, the mass demand for madras has meant the rapid industrialisation of its production.

Madras check, like all Indian textiles, lacks an official Denomination of Origin - a strictly monitored designation that, for example, makes it illegal to call sparkling wine produced outside the Champagne region of France champagne. Kavita Parmar, whose Madrid-based e-commerce brand IOU sources madras directly from villages around Pondicherry and Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu, pointed out that developing such a designation would be difficult. Weaving communities have migrated over the millennia, taking skills and techniques with them, and, in the case of madras, absorbing new patterns and designs.

When Parmar started the IOU Project at the end of 2011, her hope was to resuscitate the market for verifiably hand-woven fabrics connected in a meaningful way to their origins. She described madras as "the most used, ubiquitous piece of fabric", but said it "has lost its history. I think there are very few people on earth who don't know what a madras plaid is - but they don't know where it comes from." Parmar's website, iouproject.com, allows shoppers to use geo-tagged serial codes to "meet" the individual Indian weavers and European tailors who created their garments. Though Parmar's brand is not designed specifically for consumers in the developed world, the prices - from Euro 39 for a scarf to about Euro 100 for a sundress - and the focus on ethical trade and labour practices, have attracted its largest audiences in Japan, Europe and the United States.

Parmar of IOU described madras as “the most used, ubiquitous piece of fabric”

When I arrived at Columbia University as an undergraduate in 2006, the band of the moment happened to be a set of recent alumni calling themselves Vampire Weekend. Their music combined a singular preoccupation with old signifiers of preppy culture with a joyful appropriation of West African rhythms. Their diverse family backgrounds subverted the ethnic hegemony of the American old guard, even while their look - bow ties, blazers and plaid - and their educational credentials marked them as inheritors of that legacy. But by then, the semiotics of prep had changed: hipsters used the symbols of prep to mock the desire for membership in an outmoded elite, while also indicating membership in a new one based on cultural rather than financial capital and tied more closely to taste than to race.

When we spoke last month, Parmar credited the success of IOU to a similar individualism. The rising demand for what she calls "mass customisation" has created a booming market for products that can be made at scale but that, through the accumulation of small individual details - runs of fabric that can produce no more than three shirts, for instance - reinforce the consumer's belief in his own essential singularity. Members of the new elite use a similar type of "mass customisation" to fill in the sketchy outlines of their political identities, picking and choosing from a ready-made set of causes to define themselves. They may focus on eating local and seasonal, or on avoiding gluten and dairy. Others may seek out organic cottons and fair-trade silks.

The people I spoke to who work closely with handlooms, either in the NGO sector or as scholars of Indian craft, agreed that, for the industry to survive, it will have to focus on the luxury market - a market driven, at least at this historical moment, by the cult of authenticity. As the idea of ethical consumerism infiltrates India's young, globalised urban elite, high-end local brands such as 11.11 and pero have chosen to build their identities around handloom fabrics and intelligent, responsible engagement with indigenous craft techniques. Both brands market their lines of elegant, casual street-wear to a wealthy, globally informed audience. On its website, 11.11 says of its garments, which, like bleeding madras, alter with wear, "being surrounded by natural, changing, unique objects helps us to connect to an authentic reality." The promises here are not substantially different from those offered by Hathaway half a century ago: this product connects you to the world.

This is an extract reprinted with permission from the June 2015 issue of The Caravan, ©Delhi Press