For over a year now, I have taken a lot of ribbing. When I bought a light-brown corduroy suit last autumn, in the eyes of most friends all that was missing were the leather elbow patches and perhaps, one day, a pipe to go with my beard.
Fortunately, Roald Dahl rode to the rescue. The surprise combination of Fantastic Mr Fox, stop-motion animation and kooky film-maker Wes Anderson seems to have catapulted corduroy into the fashion magazines. Ever since Anderson dressed Mr Fox up in a natty double-breasted cord number and gave him George Clooney's voice, the buzz is as audible as fingernails raked across the trouser leg.
The influential US style magazine Details plugs corduroy suits on its cover this month, albeit with a few worrying caveats: "Tan is challenging, but not impossible to master. Just keep everything else basic: white shirt, no tie, and brown wing tips." Not being sure what wing tips are and having regularly tried to pair tan with a grey shirt, I feel out of my depth even before reading the cautionary addendum about not coming across like a member of the landed gentry.
The fox-hunting types might have had one thing right, though: cords need a good thrashing before they can be considered properly broken in. Until you've ridden them hard (up and down London's Caledonian Road on a bike, in my case), the dangers of feeling like an uncomfortable box of corrugated cardboard are high. The thicker the cord, or wale, the more likely you are to resemble a ploughed field.
Anderson says he has a new corduroy suit made for himself every couple of years, but then this is a man who made his latest film by shooting 61,920 separate still photographs just so the animal fur would look like it was rustling in the wind. The truth is that cords should be all about not trying too hard.
My one other experiment in corduroy flopped because it looked too foppish, even for Mr Fox. The glossy, black two-piece (medium wale) looked nice on the hanger, but never got to the crumpled stage because it used to get mistaken from a distance for a velvet smoking jacket – definitely not the look I was after.
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