5-Wale Cords

5-Wale. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice that the man thatching the roof of that sensational thick-walled cottage in Dorset isn’t merely wearing corduroy pants, but extra-wide-wale corduroy pants. Aha! The Broadway director driving to work from Snedens Landing in his Aston Martin is wearing, naturally, very-wide-wale pants. The abstract-expressionist artist roughing it in his $2 million loft in SoHo is wearing, what else, enormously-wide-wale pants. What is at work here is evidence of a worldwide, but unspoken, preference: Wider is better. (Wales are the soft, velvety ribs of corduroy. The fewer the wales per inch, the wider they are; the wider they are, the more handsome. Why? God works in mysterious ways.) I had to go to some lengths to find 5-wale corduroy and am pretty confident that you will appreciate it when you see it and wear it. Lustrous and velvety, but thick and deep and bumpy. Very uncitified; striking just the right note of dressing down when worn with a contradi