Material

The Umbrella Word of the Textile Trade

Material is the most general noun in the apparel vocabulary, and its generality is its function. Every more specific term — fabric, cloth, textile, leather, webbing, trim — names a kind of material, and trade documents use material wherever the kind has not yet been decided or does not matter: raw material purchasing, material costs, material handling, material safety. A designer materials board may pin woven, knitted, non-woven and leather swatches side by side, all legitimately materials, because the decision the board records is what each part of the garment will be made from. The definition given here — material is cloth or fabric — states the apparel center of the word: in a clothing context, an unnamed material is understood to be a textile sheet good, not metal, plastic sheet or wood. Context supplies the narrowing: a shoe material list may include leather and rubber, a dress material is a fabric, and a material composition line is a fiber list. Readers who need the specific member of the family should follow the glossary onward to fabric and cloth, the two pages that define the material in its woven, knitted and finished forms.

Because the word is general, it is also the word used where precision must be added by specification rather than assumed. Two garments both described as made of natural material may differ in every practical property; the fiber percentages, the construction — woven, knit or non-woven — and the finish are what turn material from a label into information. That is why professional product descriptions never stop at the word: they state fiber content by percentage, name the fabric type where one is established (a twill, a jersey, a canvas), and give care instructions that follow from both. Material is the question; fiber, fabric and finish are the answers.

Materials Beyond Cloth in a Garment

A finished garment is an assembly of materials of several kinds, and the broader sense of the word covers all of them. The main fabric is the material in the definition narrow sense; but linings, interfacings, threads, elastic, buttons, zips, padding and labels are also materials in the bill of materials that manufacturers use to cost and source a garment — the document is literally called a bill of materials. That industrial usage explains why material appears in so many trade compounds where cloth alone would not fit. For the glossary reader the practical takeaway is a reading rule: when material stands alone in an apparel text it means the fabric; when it appears with a qualifier — raw, synthetic, recycled, lining, shell — the qualifier carries the specific meaning, and the word itself contributes only the sense of physical stuff the product is made from. From that base, the specialized pages of this section take over: every fabric definition here is the definition of one material, described by its fiber, its structure and its finish.