Random Fabric Material Generator

What the fabric generator does

You need a cloth. For a costume, a character, a design brief, a game, or because you saw the word bombazine somewhere and it has been bothering you since.

This gives you one. Pull a batch and you will get a few you own and several you have never seen written down. Osnaburg. Paduasoy. Linsey-woolsey. Sea silk.

What follows is the reason these words are so strange. Fabric names are among the oldest words still in daily use in English, and a lot of them are not describing a cloth at all. They are describing a place.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One if you are picking, a handful if you are browsing.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

One word, four different questions

Here is why fabric is confusing, and it is not you.

When somebody says what is it made of and the answer is satin, that answer is a category error, and everybody nods anyway.

Cotton is a fibre. It is a thing that grew. So are wool, silk, linen, hemp, jute, ramie, cashmere and alpaca. Nylon, polyester, acrylic and rayon are also fibres, just made in a reactor instead of a field. This is the question what is the thread.

Satin is not a fibre. Satin is a weave. It is a way of crossing threads so that most of the surface is smooth uninterrupted warp, which is why it shines. You can weave satin out of silk. You can weave it out of polyester. Both are satin and one costs forty times the other. Denim is a weave too, a twill. So are poplin, gabardine, chino, oxford, drill, damask, taffeta, organza, chiffon and georgette. This is the question how are the threads crossed.

Jersey is neither. Jersey is a knit, which is loops rather than crossings, which is why your t-shirt stretches and your shirt does not. Mesh and fishnet are knits. Velvet and corduroy and terrycloth are something else again, constructions with a pile standing up off the base. Felt is not woven or knitted at all. It is just fibres bullied into staying together, which makes it the oldest trick in the book.

And then Gore-Tex, Kevlar, Cordura, Coolmax, Polar Fleece, Crimplene, Ultrasuede and Ventile are none of the above. They are trademarks. They are a company's name for a specific product, and the reason you know them is that somebody spent money making sure you did.

So four completely different questions, all answered with the same grammar. What is the thread, how is it crossed, how is it built, and who owns the name. Nobody tells you which one you are being given, and the label on your jacket will happily mix all four in one line.

Once you can hear the difference you cannot stop, and it makes you much harder to sell things to.

Your wardrobe is a map

Now the good part.

Denim is from Nîmes. The cloth was serge de Nîmes, serge from the town of Nîmes in the south of France, and English chewed the phrase down to one word. And the trousers are jeans because the sailors of Genoa wore that kind of cloth, and Genoa in French is Gênes.

So the most American object ever manufactured is named after two towns in Europe and neither of them is in America.

It keeps going. Every one of these is a place.

• Damask, from Damascus
• Muslin, from Mosul
• Calico, from Calicut on the Malabar coast
• Cashmere, from Kashmir
• Madras, from Madras
• Duffel, from Duffel in Belgium
• Jersey, from Jersey
• Worsted, from Worstead, a village in Norfolk
• Tulle, from Tulle in France
• Angora, from Ankara
• Shantung, from Shandong

Every one of those is a town or a region that was once so good at making one particular cloth that the world stopped bothering with a separate word for it. That is what these names are. They are receipts.

And the pattern says something. Look at where they cluster. Mosul, Damascus, Calicut, Kashmir, Madras, Shandong, Ankara. The naming of cloth in English is mostly a record of English speakers arriving somewhere, encountering a textile industry that was already extremely good, and taking the place name home along with the goods. Worstead is in Norfolk and Duffel is in Belgium, so it is not only that. But it is mostly that.

A couple are not places and are better for it. Seersucker comes through Hindi from Persian, shir o shakkar, milk and sugar, which is a description of the fabric's own texture, the smooth stripe and the puckered stripe running side by side. Somebody looked at that cloth and thought of a bowl of milk with sugar poured in and not yet stirred. That is a better name than anything a marketing department has produced since.

And khaki is Urdu, from the Persian for dust. It was a colour word describing a cloth, then it became the cloth, then it became a colour again in English, and then it became a pair of trousers. Four hops. It is still on the move.

Scarlet was a cloth before it was a colour

Scarlet is on this list, and if that looks like a mistake, it is not. It is the best word in here.

Scarlet is a fabric. It was a fine, expensive, tightly finished wool, and the name had nothing to do with red. A scarlet was a grade of cloth, the way we would say a worsted or a tweed. You could have a green scarlet. That sentence made sense to people, and it makes none to us.

Here is what happened. That cloth was the best wool you could buy, and if you owned the best wool you could buy, you dyed it with the most expensive dye you could buy, which was kermes, and kermes is red. So the finest cloth in Europe was nearly always red, for centuries, because that is what money looked like.

And the association got so total that the name of the cloth slid sideways onto the colour of the dye, and then the cloth was forgotten and the colour kept the word.

So every time you say scarlet you are naming a type of woollen fabric that has not been made for hundreds of years, and you have no idea, and neither does anyone else.

Crimson did the same thing from the other end, since it comes from the name of the insect the kermes dye is made from. Both of these are on the same road, and the road runs one way. The thing gets forgotten and the adjective survives it.

That is what a fabric list actually is. It is a graveyard of things that were once so ordinary that people named the world after them.

Where these come from

The fabrics here come from a list our team put together and checked by hand. Press the button and one is drawn out of it at random.

That is the whole thing, and it runs on your own device.

Thirty thousand years of this

Put a number on how long people have been doing this and the number is not what you would guess.

In 2009 a team working in Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia published something small and enormous. Flax fibres. Wild flax, spun, twisted, and some of them dyed. Pink, turquoise, black. Thirty thousand years old.

Nobody was farming. Nobody had pottery. Nobody had a wheel, a village, a written word or a metal tool. And somebody sat in a cave and twisted plant fibre into thread and then decided the thread should be turquoise.

Linen is on this list, and that is the same plant. Flax. The line from those fibres to a linen shirt is unbroken, and it is longer than agriculture, longer than cities, longer than more or less everything we usually call the start of things.

So when you pull a name out of this list you are not pulling out a product. Textile is one of the oldest technologies people have, older than the pot and the plough, and every one of these words is a piece of it that somebody found worth naming.

Sea silk is on here too, and it is nearly at the other end. It is made from the beard of a Mediterranean clam, thread the animal uses to anchor itself to rock, collected by divers and spun into a brown gold cloth. It has been made for two thousand years and there is essentially one person left alive who knows how, on Sant'Antioco in Sardinia, and she will not sell any of it.

Thirty thousand years at one end and one woman at the other. It is quite a list.

Questions people ask

Is satin the same as silk?

No, and this is the single most useful thing on this page if you are ever buying anything. Silk is a fibre. Satin is a weave. Most satin sold today is polyester woven in a satin weave, which is a completely legitimate product and is not what most people think they are buying. If a label says satin and does not say silk, it is not silk. The word you want on the label is the fibre, and if the fibre is missing it is missing on purpose.

Why is Harris Tweed always capitalised?

Because it is legally defined, which almost nothing in this field is. Under UK law it has to be made from pure virgin wool, dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides, and handwoven by an islander at their own home. Not in a mill. At home. There is an Act of Parliament and an inspector and an Orb mark stamped on the cloth. It is one of the few names on this list where the word still means the place, rather than being a fossil of one.

Are natural fabrics better than synthetic?

Depends entirely on what you are asking them to do, and the framing is a trap. Wool is astonishing and so is Kevlar. Cotton is lovely and it will also kill you on a mountain, because wet cotton holds water against your skin and stops insulating, which is why the outdoor saying is that cotton kills. Natural means the fibre grew. It does not mean good, and it does not mean sustainable either. Meanwhile some of the best performance fabrics on this list are wool with a clever finish, and some are pure chemistry. Ask what the cloth has to do, then pick.

Can I use these in a story or a costume brief?

That is what a lot of people pull them for, and the obscure ones are worth the most. Bombazine tells a reader more than black cloth, because bombazine is what Victorian mourning was made of, and a reader who does not know that still feels the weight of the word. Look one up before you use it though. Putting a character in a fabric that was not invented yet is a small mistake that a certain kind of reader will write to you about.

Why are there so many words for what looks like the same thing?

Because for most of history cloth was one of the most valuable things anybody owned, and valuable things get precise vocabulary. Wool was money. A merchant needed to distinguish a broadcloth from a kerseymere from a wadmal the way a builder now distinguishes grades of steel, and getting it wrong cost real money. Nearly all of that precision is gone from ordinary speech and the words are still here, floating, waiting for somebody to look them up.

References

1. Kvavadze, E., Bar-Yosef, O., Belfer-Cohen, A., Boaretto, E., Jakeli, N., Matskevich, Z. and Meshveliani, T. (2009). 30,000-year-old wild flax fibers. Science, 325(5946), 1359. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1175404
2. Harris Tweed Authority. The Harris Tweed Act 1993. https://www.harristweed.org/the-orb/
3. Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/
4. Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/