When Madras Bled Into American Style

The corporate history books are filled with self-inflicted Hindenburg-level disasters, preserved for the ages like an insect in amber studied by archeologists: Blockbuster rejecting Netflix, New Coke, Kodak blowing off the digital camera in favor of film, and family-friendly Toys R Us offering “Breaking Bad” action figures with a detachable sack of cash and a bag of meth (Google it). 

Seldom does a corporation turn such a face plant into a boon like the sartorial legends Brooks Brothers did in the mid-1950s when it purchased 10,000 yards of a lightweight, breathable, hand-woven fabric which would be used in a new summer offering. “Madras” is a thin, blemished, and combed cotton fabric from Southern India which for almost 5,000 years has been hand colored using natural dyes like laterites, indigo, turmeric, and sesame seed oil which give it a bright and striking appearance.  

In the 1930s and 40s, authentic madras fabric was something of a status symbol, a sign that one had the means to travel to faraway places like India, the Caribbean and various European destinations. Brooks Brothers decided to build on this lore, marketing everything from shirts and pants to tailored jackets for consumers whose tastes sat at the intersection of the Hampton’s leisure class and globe-trotting hipsterism.

If only they’d done their homework. The fabric was all cotton and was dyed with all natural materials, the colors faded and ran together with every wash. Brooks Brothers were inundated with complaints. In full damage-control mode, Brooks Brothers called in an advertising legend, David Ogilvy who was known as the “Father of Advertising.” Ogilvy re-imagined this possibly fatal-flaw for the fabric and offered: "Magical things happen to the shirt when you wash it," according to the new the campaign. The product was rebranded as Indian bleeding madras, the fabric that was guaranteed to fade. Its chief flaw became it most prized virtue.  The spin posited that madras over time would produce a shirt which was “marvelously muted” and “dustily well-bred.”

By 1960 the Indian bleeding madras shirt was a staple of Ivy League institutions everywhere. No trip to a college campus was complete without several sightings of the au courant, plaid-adjacent bleeding madras shirt. In January 1960, the Wall Street Journal reported that the hottest thing in menswear was madras. Esquire’s fashion director OE Schoeffler continued the fervor in 1963, trumpeting madras as “bigger than ever.” 

Bleeding madras shirts began appearing in popular literature, films and with various musicians. In the Outsiders, S. E. Hinton cast the privileged “Socs” (short for “Socials”) in the shirt as a marker of distinction from their rivals, the street-schooled “greasers” — the urbane pitched against the urban. The fabric gained additional swagger when jazz legend/trend maestro John Coltrane sported the look in several high-profile photoshoots. By the 1980s, The Official Preppy Handbook, Lisa Birnbach’s satirical bestseller, lampooned WASP culture while using the iconic madras motif on its cover, further cementing the look as a cultural touchstone, albeit in a sardonic manner. Movies like American Graffiti, Animal House and Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom all featured characters clad in madras as a means to shorthand the character’s backstory. 

Although the dyes are different today, the look is the same: vibrant colors, intersecting vertical and horizontal lines, all cotton: the Indian Bleeding madras is as entrenched in modern American fashion as blue jeans, the baseball cap and the navy blazer.