Talk:Broadcloth

Light or heavy weight?

The cotton broadcloth that I've seen has been a light, fine material, suitable for a summer shirt. That doesn't go with the description of broadcloth, even cotton broadcloth, as heavy. Comments? --Monado (talk) 04:27, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Broadcloth discussion transferred from User talk:Andy Dingley

NB: The following discussion was transferred from this revision of Talk:Andy Dingley.

Thanks for clarifying, I was trying to work out what it was and didn't think it looked much like a facecloth, but thought maybe that was what was meant, (as I was reading the two words together) and thought maybe it was one of those stealth anonymous edits where someone sneaks a random word into the middle of a sentence that tends to pass unnoticed for months/years. The note/definition is REALLY helpful, thanks - I couldn't find anything on quick searches for blind cloth (apart from fabric for roller blinds). Am more of a fashion historian than a textiles specialist, so sometimes these fine distinctions are alien to me.... Mabalu (talk) 11:04, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

You're welcome - it's impossible to search for this, owing to the false positives and the number of novels about blind weavers (really!). If I can tidy the study enough to reach the piles of bookshelves behind the piles of book boxes behind the piles of books I might even get to a "dictionary of tailoring terms" or something. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:14, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

I just did some quick reading to try and clarify what was with this "cotton broadcloth" weirdness and discovered that it's an Americanism for poplin. Should there be a hatnote at the top to redirect people looking for American broadcloth to poplin? I've added referenced notes to both pages to explain this. Mabalu (talk) 16:19, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Probably. It's usually better to over-explain than under-explain. Not being American I'm unfamiliar with this, but I know that "poplin" has a lot of local differences in its meanings. Andy Dingley (talk) 18:09, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

For what it's worth, @Mabalu:, that's simply untrue. Here's Bennett's Cotton Fabric Glossary, showing USAnian use a decade before. Anmccaff (talk) 19:22, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

(Also, "poplin" remains the dominant name for cotton plainweave used for better men's shirts.) Anmccaff (talk) 19:23, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello Anmccaff. Thanks for that link, but I'm a bit confused because when I tried to search for broadcloth or broad cloth in that book nothing came up. How does it prove that broadcloth was used to describe shirt quality poplin 10 years before the early 1920s? Mabalu (talk) 12:24, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

It doesn't. It shows that cotton poplin was available and known as such; has been continuously. Not something that was introduced in the twenties.

"Cotton broadcloth" was, and is, a term so all-encompassing as to to be almost meaningless. From the twenties, the USDA proposed standards for the term, and much US and some Canadian (and a surprising amount of British, BTW) usage later consolidated around those standards. Here's their take from 1938: Broadcloth is another fabric that has been lowered in quality until the word means nothing at the present time. An analysis of a great variety of fabrics sold as broadcloths discloses that constructions vary from those originally associated with the word to fabrics more like muslin than broadcloth. In the twenties, "cotton broadcloth" did not mean "cotton poplin", necessarily. It could be anything from a short-napped blind face fabric that looked and felt a good deal like the original all the way down to bad muslin. Anmccaff (talk) 16:10, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

It's clearly quite a minefield, but as it is, the current edits (even if I say so myself) are an improvement on the previous version that had cotton quite early on, with a rather sketchy cite. Incidentally, should we move this discussion over to Talk:Broadcloth? I'm inclined to trust the Fairchild given that it is considered an industry standard text and is edited by two established experts/academics in the field. Of course, experts make mistakes too, but they are certainly very specific on the question. They even use an illustration of a man's cotton shirt as the leading image under broadcloth, which does make me raise an eyebrow, but if the "industry standard for textile terminology" is so explicit, then I guess they've a reason for that. We may disagree with them (I certainly think they should have wool broadcloth as the primary definition, not definition no.4(!)) but it's not a source we can justifiably discredit/ignore even if we know better. Mabalu (talk) 19:11, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, if no one (I guess that would be Brother Dingley, in this case) objects, xfering it intact to broadcloth makes good sense. To add a little more to be transferred over, one thing which the Fairchild cite does not make clear is that the so-called "English Broadcloth" (which appears to often have hailed from Scotland, just to compound the mess) was a very heavily callendered cloth, that came close to a uniform, threadless appearance in the way that the broadcloths do. Note the plural; a big part of the reason why broadcloth shows up less in later years is that specific variants of the technique were beginning to be seen more as their own selves. Melton, duffel, mackinac, or brushed wool serge (as opposed to woolen or unbrushed worsted serge) would be described as such, and woolen and brushed wool serge had pretty well taken over the old broadcloth turf, except for the areas where weather resistance was paramount, and then the cloth was more likely to be called melton. Anmccaff (talk) 19:42, 18 March 2017 (UTC)