Yarn with loops that give it a textured surface, or fabric made with that yarn.
Bouclé is a fancy yarn built from strands of different thickness and twist. In the CottonWorks description, two fine yarns are twisted together with a thicker, hard-twisted yarn that is fed in faster than the fine ones, normally in the opposite direction. Usually there are three strands, one less taut than the others. The result is a yarn of varying thickness with small loops. The name also covers cloth woven or knitted from that yarn, which takes on an uneven, textured surface.
The common mistake is to treat bouclé as a fiber or a weave. It is a way of building a yarn, so the term says nothing about what the yarn is spun from, and the loops are carried in the yarn itself. A weft loop weave, by contrast, makes its loops in the weaving, by pulling weft up into loops on the face of the cloth.
In job listings
Bouclé is seldom named in luxury listings. Fabric of this kind is the work of fabric developers, who brief mills, develop treatments and finishes, and test new fabrics against performance standards, in partnership with design. See current fabric developer roles.
