Rachel Bilson’s wearing it. Jessica Simpson sports it. Heck, even Ashton Kutcher dons the funky plaid that’s making a huge fashion comeback. Madras, a light-weight, bright fabric that screams summer, is huge in Hollywood and is creeping into catalogs and clothing stores.
“You’ve got great celebrities running around in madras shorts and tops,” says Tara Kraft, the fashion expert at Star magazine. When Hollywood hotties sport a fashion, you know it’s popular, she says.
Old Navy encourages you to crave madras with its “Make it Madras” campaign and online sales of madras on trend-barometer eBay increased more than 70 percent between May and June.
Melissa Moylan, an editor at FashionSnoops, a trend forecasting company and a fashion consultant in New York, says the hot summer style is back even bigger this year because the casual look is booming.
“Because culture today is so casual, there was a demand for something cool and fun with less structure,” Moylan noted by e-mail.
“Madras fits right in with that demand, so it has become readily available.” This fun fabric is named for the city in India where it was first woven. Introduced to the United States in the 1930s, it didn’t become really popular until the 1950s and 1960s.
Madras is made of loosely woven cotton threads to create breathability, in bright colors, including pinks, blues and greens. The weave creates a plaid patchwork of extremely soft material that hangs away from the body to prevent uncomfortable clinging.
In its heyday, madras was known for its running dyes. Every time the madras was washed, the colors would run, creating a unique washed-out look, known as bleeding madras.
The look was extremely fashionable, but there was a fine line between hip and way too washed out. Hipsters from the 1950s and 1960s knew exactly how many times they could wash their madras before it became too faded and tragically unhip.
Today, madras dyes no longer run, so the washed-out look that was once so popular has become a thing of the past. But besides the death of bleeding, not much has changed in the style’s resurrection. The basic patterns and color schemes are similar to the older style.
Maine-based madras wholesaler Jenna Sisselman even sells a color scheme identical to one sold in the 1950s and 1960s.
Original madras, woven in India, can be found in smaller boutiques and online. Because of the labor involved in the manufacturing process, traditional madras sells to upward of $80.
“Madras is madras,” says Trisha Fritz, the buyer of men’s and women’s apparel for Dunkelberger’s. “I even think they’re the same colors. The styles are just updated.”
But with the resurrection of madras also came an updated, cheaper version of the original. Instead of the expensive, hand-woven Indian fabric, madras look-alikes are created by printing a madras plaid pattern on cotton to create a comparable look. This is the style most often found in malls and department stores.
“Back in the day, it was the men who wore the madras shorts or jackets,” says Andrea Lui, the brand manager at Old Navy. “Today, you’re seeing it in skirts and things that women can wear too. It’s not really the madras that’s changed but the product and the styling and what we’re putting the print on that are changing.”
