Madras (cloth)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Madras is a lightweight cotton fabric with patterned texture, used primarily for summer clothing -- pants, shorts, dresses and jackets. The fabric takes its name from the former English name of the city of Chennai, India.
One style popular during the 1960s was called bleeding Madras. It used dyes that were not colorfast in a typically plaid design, resulting in bleeding and fading colors that yielded a new look to the fabric each time it was laundered.
The fabric is mentioned many times in the S.E. Hinton book The Outsiders as a favored clothing worn by the Socs, short for socialites.
