Friday, December 05, 2025 |
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Corduroy has a bit of high-brow, low-brow woven into it. Traditionally, it was a workwear fabric. For the past half century, it's been associated with country houses and stuffy professor types. This is what makes it such a fun fabric to wear. It can take a beating, but it reads a bit formal in 2025. If you wear a corduroy sport coat to dinner—even if you've beat it up like an old pair of jeans—you'll look better, more sophisticated than most of the guys in the joint. Of course, as with everything, there are rules. Since fall and winter are peak cord seasons, we think now is the right time to lay those rules out for you. —Luke Guillory, commerce editor Plus: |
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We'll cover everything from humble trousers to the full Wes Anderson. |
Corduroy, like many of our modern menswear building blocks, has a long history in workwear. An early precursor of the fabric came from ancient Egypt, where ancient weavers wove durable cotton on the banks of the Nile into a simple fabric called fustian. But it wasn't until 19th-century England, in Manchester, that the fabric took on its current signature: the wales. Wales is the term for the ridges that you most likely associate with corduroy. Small ones are called pincords and the really big boys are called wide-wale, or, more charmingly, elephant wales. England's working class wore made corduroy a modern workwear staple. From there, it drifted into the larger world of style: Western and Ivy among them. Contemporary associations lean more professorial than proletariat: think rumpled sport coats and cigar smoke. But the world of corduroy is not so limiting. Corduroy has shown up on hippies, French aristocrats, rock stars, Wes Anderson's red carpet looks (not to mention every costume department of his films), and, yes, overall-clad storybook bears. Each gives a little clue on how to wear them. |
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The 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street established that the one true Santa Claus operates out of the store's flagship Herald Square location. After a parade float delivers him to Macy's on Thanksgiving morning, you can find him there on the eighth floor, wedged between an in-store cooking school and a clothing department, deep in a labyrinth of Christmas kitsch called Santaland. Macy's has safeguarded this mystique for eighty years. When journalists ask the company who plays Santa, a spokeswoman insists again and again, like a stubborn witness giving a deposition: "Santa is Santa." The several hundred men who have worn the red suit at Santaland likewise observe an omertà. "We have a vow of secrecy about not talking about Macy's operations," says Brian DePetris, who worked as Santa for twenty-one years. "When you break that, it's like you're betraying the brotherhood." |
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Every year new gadgets, watches, and little luxuries flood stores and online retailers, and consumers are presented with more options than they know what to do with. Every brand, large and small, begs you to scroll its gift guide. How can you keep up? What should you buy for people you love this year? That's where we come in. Esquire's editors spent the entire year testing products, visiting showrooms, and cataloging the best releases of the year. It's all led to this: the best gifts on Earth. After all we've seen, it was no small feat to narrow it down to the 26 hottest products of the year. But we managed. We found the best LED light mask of the year, one you'll want gift to someone close to you just so you can be sure to use it on a regular basis. We also found an e-reader that's barely bigger than your smart phone, a projector small enough to fit in your briefcase, and so much more. |
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