WALING.(The Talk of the Town)(Corduroy Appreciation Club)

Several years ago, Miles Rohan was out of work and feeling lonely. He thought it might be nice to belong to a social club, like the Elks or the Shriners, and, in the absence of any invitations, decided to start his own. He noticed that he'd accumulated a good amount of corduroy clothing in his twenty-some years, figured that that ought to count for something, and made a theme of it: a corduroy club. He established a Web site, printed up membership cards, and hit the streets to recruit--in bars, on subway platforms, wherever he saw people wearing corduroy. "It was a complete failure," he said the other day. "Someone"--a particularly disagreeable accostee, he believes--"hacked into the Web site and destroyed it."

Rohan, whose given name is Michael (he switched after watching "Sleeper," and identifying with Woody Allen's character, Miles Monroe), was recounting the aborted attempt in the company of about a hundred similarly dressed guests at the initial meeting of the revived Corduroy Appreciation Club. In the intervening years, he said, he had found a new job (at Nickelodeon), got married, and detected an uptick in general corduroy wearing: all good things. His wife, Jordana Furcht, who is a graphic designer, helped him with a sharper-looking batch of cards (they feature an image of a humpback whale, next to the phrase "All Wales Welcome," and have real corduroy pasted on the back), and a few weeks ago he set out to canvass again. He brought fistfuls of cards into clothing stores and stealthily deposited them in the pockets of corduroy garments, hoping that shoppers would discover them and visit his new Web site. ("Banana Republic was scary--I almost got caught, because the pockets there are too small," he said.) He chased a well-corded man into a Virgin Megastore. ("He looked cool, but he was completely freaked out by me.") He stood on Astor Place holding a sign that said, "Do You Like Corduroy?"

The meeting took place on November 11th--"because 11/11 is the date that most resembles corduroy," Rohan said--in the Back Room, a Lower East Side bar said to be owned by Tim Robbins (who sometimes wears corduroy jackets) and the retired hockey star Mark Messier (who certainly does not). Guests were asked to wear at least two corduroy items and donate a dollar; in return, they ...