Chambray

Chambray takes its name, like batiste and cambric before it, from Cambrai in northern France — a town whose looms supplied Europe with fine linen for four centuries and whose name English has now borrowed three separate times. The cloth as it is understood today is a cotton one, and its structure is the whole of its character.

Chambray Is Not Denim

The two are confused constantly and are not closely related. Both are woven with a coloured warp and an undyed weft, which is why both show white at a worn edge. But denim is a twill — the weft passes under two or more warp threads at a time, producing the diagonal rib that makes the cloth heavy, hard-wearing and capable of fading in the particular way jeans do. Chambray is a plain weave, one over one, which yields a lighter, softer, flatter cloth with a faint mottling where the blue and white threads alternate. Denim is trousering. Chambray is shirting. Weight is not the difference; structure is.

The Blue Shirt

Its history is a working one. The chambray shirt was standard issue in the United States Navy and standard wear across American industry, sufficiently universal that the phrase blue collar was coined from shirts like it. That plainness is precisely what recommended it to luxury a century later: unlined, softly collared and cut close, a chambray shirt reads as deliberate understatement in a way no dress shirt manages, and it has become a fixture of the Italian summer wardrobe.

The category is a useful test of a house’s judgement. There is nothing to hide behind in a plain blue shirt — only the yarn, the collar, the placket and the fit — and the ones that succeed do so on those four things alone.