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Naming Cloth

© Ann Garner

Calico is another cotton fabric that originated in India, in Calicut, to be exact, hence its name. It is a plain-woven cotton with fine-figured prints, popular for women's and girls' dresses. In fact, during the Great Depression, U. S. flour mills could import the fabric so cheaply from India that they bagged their flour in calico print sacks and when the flour was emptied into the bin, another little girl could have a pretty print dress. I was the proud owner of clothing made from flour sacks! My mother could make almost anything on that old treadle Singer.

When a Midwestern housewife of the early 1900s was not wearing homespun or calico, she was probably wearing a home-sewn gingham dress, usually made in a checked pattern woven from yarn-dyed cotton. This word came from the Malay language: ginggang, meaning "striped."

Still another Asian fabric belongs in the silk family of cloth. It is known as pongee. The threads are spun from natural silk filaments and then woven into a natural colored garment of slightly uneven texture. In Northern Chinese, the word "pun-chi" means home-made. A slightly heavier fabric made from the same kind of thread is shantung, named for that Province of China.

A great innovator in textile weaving, J. M. Jacquard, gives his name to a fabric that has led the way to today's computerized looms. Jacquard fabric is woven under the direction of cards above the loom that control the complex patterns being created in the cloth. Another three-dimensional fabric is brocade, coming from the word "brocado," meaning "studded."

While some fabrics are very clear about their origins, some names can be confusing. For example, angora is not spun and woven from an Angora goat, but comes instead from Angora rabbits, while the Angora goat yields mohair. In general, however, part of a cloth's history is often contained in its name.