Twee Magazine

Even foxes like corduroy.

It was probably inevitable that corduroy would be adopted by the twee. There's something simultaneously dressy and dressed down about it. It's a fabric associated with both college professors and English gentleman farmers. It's nostalgic, but in a cozy, thrift-store way.

Of course, the corduroy suit is most associated with Wes Anderson. He wears them, and his characters often do as well, especially Mr. Fox, who dresses exactly like Wes Anderson. But he wasn't the first to bring it to the screen: Tom Baker wore a wide-gauged corduroy suit in 1973's "Vault of Horror;" he later wore a red corduroy shooting jacket when he played the tweest incarnation of Dr. Who, a look that the designer described as that of an "eternal student."

But, as mentioned, the look is also professorial: Donald Sutherland wore a three-piece variant when he played the lewd Professor Dave Jennings 1978's "Animal House." Unexpectedly, the tweed jacket also makes an appearance on Paul Newman in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which gives the ordinarily restrained coat a bit of wild west dash. (John Wayne also liked corduroy jackets for his cinematic cowboys). And so it's visually associated with the 60s and 70s, which may be why the Coen Brothers dressed their Greenwich Village folkie, Llewyn Davis, in a corduroy jacket, giving him a look that is at once serious and casual.