Fabric Patterns

by Drew Shiel

Having had little enough trouble finding out what kind of jacket Carlos is wearing, I set out to see if I could name the pattern on the fabric. This is… a bigger issue. The patterning depends to some degree on the fabric, and there are 269 different fabrics on this word list. And that, as far as I can see, includes no artificial fabrics like polyester or acrylics, not that I think Carlos is wearing anything like that.

Thus, it’s a bit more of a maze. However, I might be able to work at it the other way. It’s not a chequer; that’s a pattern like a chessboard.  It’s not quite a tattersall; that has very thin lines crossing over each other on a background of another colour, but it’s not a million miles away. It’s not a madras, either; that has alternating widths. Nor is it what’s called a Border tartan, and it’s definitely not a full-on tartan.

Except that, looking closer, it might actually be a tartan after all, because it has a very broad definition: “a pattern consisting of criss-crossed horizontal and vertical bands in multiple colours”, according to Wikipedia. Digging out the particular tartan name is beyond my capabilities, but I’m not unhappy with a description somewhere about “brown plaid pattern”. It’s pretty clear that actual names for patterns vary a good deal in any case, with only a few like “paisley”, “argyle” and “check” being universally recognised.

So the pattern implies that it’s a woollen of some kind, certainly something woven. It’s probably quite thick, too, looking at the texture. I’m not sure I’ll get anything more detailed than that, so the next step will be to go and look at some online retailers, and see if I can locate anything like it.